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  • Is Joel Test really a good gauging tool?

    - by henry
    I just learned about Joel Test. I have been computer programmer for 22 years, but somehow never heard about it before. I consider my best job so far to be this small investment managing company with 30 employees and only 3 people in IT department. I am no longer with them but I had being working there for 5 years – my longest streak with any given company. To my surprise they scored extremely poor on Joel Test. The only two questions I would answer “yes” are #4: Do you have a bug database? And #9: Do you use the best tools money can buy? Everything else is either “sometimes” or straight “no”. Here is what I liked about the company however: a) Good pay, they bragged about it to my face and I bragged about it to their face, so it was almost like a family environment. b) I always knew big picture. When writing a code to solve particular problem there were no ambiguity about the business nature of that problem. Even though we did not always had written specs we could ask business users a question anytime, often yelling it across the floor. I could even talk to executives any time I felt like doing it: no appointment necessary. c) Immediate feedback. Once we implement a solution and make business users happy they immediately let us know that, we (programmers) become heroes of the moment. d) No red tape. I could always buy any tools I deem necessary, and design solutions the way my professional judgment dictates. e) Flexibility. If I had mid-day dental appointment that is near my house rather than near the office, I would send email to the company: "FYI: I work from home today". As long as one of 3 IT guys was on the floor (to help traders in case their monitors go dark) they did not care where 2 others are. So the question thus becomes how valuable Joel Test is? Why bother with it?

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  • Applicability of the Joel Test to web development companies

    - by dreftymac
    QUESTION: How can you re-write the questions of the Joel test to apply to web developers? 1. Do you use source control? (source control for all aspects of your app, including configuration, database and user-based settings?) 2. Can you make a build in one step? (can you deploy a site from staging to prod in 1 step?) ... 10. Do you have testers? (how do you test AJAX and CSS?) BACKGROUND: This is for people who work in a shop that does some web development but also uses some off-the-shelf tools like Drupal and Wordpress, but doing custom development on top of that. RELATED LINKS: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html What do you think about the Joel Test?

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  • Bare minimum on the Joel Test

    - by Fung
    From the Joel Test, of the 12, which do you think are the absolute must-haves to at least have a decently running software department/company? I realise there is no absolutely right answer. I'm just trying to get opinions of others out there. My own organization only manages a measly 5 of 12. If you check listings on Careers 2.0, most companies don't score a full 12 either but I'm sure they're doing fine. Does SO publish the stats for those anywhere? Or has anyone tried scrapping the results? Would be interesting to know which are practised the most. And whether because they are easier to implement or whether they actually have the most impact. Thanks.

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  • Should the Joel Test be essential for every software company? [closed]

    - by Mahbubur R Aaman
    Joel Test has 12 steps for better code. They are: Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do new candidates write code during their interview? Do you do hallway usability testing? Should these steps mandatory for every software companies? While recruiting programmers, then programmers should ask the company, as they follow joel steps?

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  • Is the Joel Test really a good gauging tool?

    - by henry
    I just learned about the Joel Test. I have been computer programmer for 22 years, but somehow I never heard about it before. I consider my best job so far to be this small investment managing company with 30 employees and only three people in the IT department. I am no longer with them, but I had being working there for five years – my longest streak with any given company. To my surprise they scored extremely poor on the Joel Test. The only two questions I would answer “yes” are #4: Do you have a bug database? And #9: Do you use the best tools money can buy? Everything else is either “sometimes” or straight “no”. Here is what I liked about the company however: Good pay. They bragged about it to my face, and I bragged about it to their face, so it was almost like a family environment. I always knew the big picture. When writing code to solve a particular problem there were no ambiguity about the business nature of that problem. Even though we did not always had written specifications we could ask business users a question anytime, often yelling it across the floor. I could even talk to executives any time I felt like doing it: no appointment necessary. Immediate feedback. Once we implement a solution and make business users happy they immediately let us know that, we (programmers) become heroes of the moment. No red tape. I could always buy any tools I deemed necessary, and design solutions the way my professional judgment dictates. Flexibility. If I had mid-day dental appointment that is near my house rather than near the office, I would send email to the company: "FYI: I work from home today". As long as one of three IT guys was on the floor (to help traders in case their monitors go dark) they did not care where two others were. So the question thus becomes: How valuable is the Joel Test? Why bother with it?

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  • Can an agile shop really score 12 on the Joel Test?

    - by Simon
    I really like the Joel test, use it myself, and encourage my staff and interviewees to consider it carefully. However I don't think I can ever score more than 9 because a few points seem to contradict the Agile Manifesto, XP and TDD, which are the bedrocks of my world. Specifically: the questions about schedule, specs, testers and quiet working conditions run counter to what we are trying to create and the values that we have adopted in being genuinely agile. So my question is: is it possible for a true Agile shop to score 12?

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  • Can an agile shop every really score 12 on the Joel Test?

    - by Simon
    I really like the Joel test, use it myself, and encourage my staff and interviewees to consider it carefully. However I don't think I can ever score more than 9 because a few points seem to contradict the Agile Manifesto, XP and TDD, which are the bedrocks of my world. Specifically the questions about schedule, specs, testers and quiet working conditions run counter to what we are trying to create and the values that we have adopted in being genuinely agile. So my question is whether it is possible for a true Agile shop to score 12?

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  • Wanted, Joel Spolsky Clone... slighty used acceptable

    - by SetiSeeker
    Hi All, First of all I have been playing with where to post my question(stackoverflow, meta.stackoverflow or here). So if this is the wrong place, my apologies to all. I love Joel Spolsky's website, Joel on Software. I love the way it mixes developer knowledge, with business knowledge and various other bits of info about, creating, building and surviving dev projects and products. So now for my question, are there any other sites, blogs or people that are similar in content and nature to Joel Spolsky and his site? Thanks.

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  • Was Joel right about XML being slow?

    - by Will
    A long time ago Joel explained how various every-day coding things were slow, and this led to XML as a data store being slow: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html Are those every-day coding things - strcat and malloc - still slow in a std::string and dlmalloc world? What else has changed in modern processors and mainstream frameworks? And is XML still slow? You can't find an RDBMS that doesn't claim some kind of native XML support these days; haven't they got it faster - a single pass to index it for example - yet?

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  • Joel Spolsky Retires From Blogging in 3 Days

    - by andyleonard
    No it's not 1 Apr. Joel Spolsky ( Blog - @spolsky ) announced recently he is retiring from blogging 17 Mar 2010 . Reading Joel on Software always makes me think. Mr. Spolsky pioneered a writing style. Along the way he empowered developers, encouraging them to speak up about the manifold misconceptions of our trade. I will miss Mr. Spolsky's writings. I wish him well in all his endeavors. :{| Andy Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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  • How Microsoft Lost the API War - by Joel Spolsky

    - by TechTwaddle
    Came across another gem of an article by Joel Spolsky. It's a pretty old article written in June of 2004, has lot of tidbits and I really enjoyed reading it, so much in fact that I read it twice! So hit the link below and give it a read if you haven't already, How Microsoft Lost the API War - Joel Spolsky excerpt, "I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."

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  • Anti-Joel Test

    - by Vaibhav Garg
    The Joel Test is a measure of how a team performs with regards to the best practices in coding. What questions, given a 'yes' answer, would subtract from the the Joel test score? (Assuming you don't simply negate the current questions on the 'Joel Test', ie: "Do you have no source control?") For example: Does the company insist on being very process heavy?

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  • Workflow for academic research projects, one-step builds, and the Joel Test

    - by Steve
    Working alone on academic research sometimes breeds bad habits. With no one else reading my code, I would write a lot of throw-away code, and I would lose track of intermediate results which, weeks or months later, I wish I had retained. My recent attempts to make my personal workflow conform to the Joel Test raised interesting questions. Academic research has inherently different goals than industrial software development, and therefore some aspects of the Joel Test become less valid. Nevertheless, I find these steps to be still valuable for academic research: Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Of particular use is the one-step build. I find myself more organized now that I have implemented the following "one-step build": In other words, I have a single script, build.py, that accepts Python code, data, and TeX as inputs. The outputs are results, figures, and a paper with all the results filled in. (Yes, I know "build" is probably not accurate in this context, but you get the idea.) By consolidating many small steps into one, I am not backtracking as much as I used to. ...but I'm sure there is still room for improvement. Question: For research projects, which steps of the Joel Test do you still value? Do you have a one-step build? If so, what does yours consist of, i.e., what inputs does it accept, and what output does it generate?

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  • How would you answer Joel's sample programming questions?

    - by Khorkrak
    I recently interviewed a candidate for a new position here. I wish though that I'd read Joel's Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing prior to that interview - naturally I happened upon it the night afterwards :P http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html So I tried answering the easy questions myself - yeah I used the python interpreter to type stuff in and tested the results a bit - I didn't look up any solutions beforehand though and I also thought about how long it took me to come up with answers for each one and what I'd look for the next time I interview someone. I'd let them type stuff into the interpreter and see how did used python's introspection capabilities too to find out things like what's the re module's method for building a regex etc. Here are my answers - these are in python of course - what are yours in your favourite language? Do you see any issues with the answers I came up with - i.e. how could they be improved upon - what did I miss? Joel's example questions: Write a function that determines if a string starts with an upper-case letter A-Z. import re upper_regex = re.compile("^[A-Z]") def starts_with_upper(text): return upper_regex.match(text) is not None Write a function that determines the area of a circle given the radius. from math import pi def area(radius): return pi * radius**2 Add up all the values in an array. sum([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) Harder Question: Write an example of a recursive function - so how about the classic factorial one: def factorial(num): if num > 1: return num * factorial(num - 1) else: return 1

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  • Should maven generate jaxb java code or just use java code from source control?

    - by Peter Turner
    We're trying to plan how to mash together a build server for our shiny new java backend. We use a lot of jaxb XSD code generation and I was getting into a heated argument with whoever cared that the build server should delete jaxb created structures that were checked in generate the code from XSD's use code generated from those XSD's Everyone else thought that it made more sense to just use the code they checked in (we check in the code generated from the XSD because Eclipse pretty much forces you to do this as far as I can tell). My only stale argument is in my reading of the Joel test is that making the build in one step means generating from the source code and the source code is not the java source, but the XSD's because if you're messing around with the generated code you're gonna get pinched eventually. So, given that we all agree (you may not agree) we should probably be checking in our generate java files, should we use them to generate our code or should we generate it using the XSD's?

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  • Can someone clarify what this Joel On Software quote means: (functional programs have no side effect

    - by Bob
    I was reading Joel On Software today and ran across this quote: Without understanding functional programming, you can't invent MapReduce, the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable. The terms Map and Reduce come from Lisp and functional programming. MapReduce is, in retrospect, obvious to anyone who remembers from their 6.001-equivalent programming class that purely functional programs have no side effects and are thus trivially parallelizable. What does he mean when he says functional programs have no side effects? And how does this make parallelizing trivial?

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  • Great Silverlight User Group meeting last night - Thanks Joel!

    - by Dave Campbell
    Last night's Silverlight User Group meeting in Phoenix went really well. We had about 15 in attendance, and everyone seemed engaged with Joel Neubeck's great Windows Phone 7 presentation. When it was over, we gave away a couple copies of Windows 7 Ultimate, one copy of the Expression Suite, an Arc Mouse, a web cam, a bunch of books, other assorted software and some TShirts.  All-in-all I think it was a good time had by all. Thanks to Joel Neubeck for the time and presentation and to Joe's mom for the babysitting! See you all next month.

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  • Can an agile shop every really score 12 on the Joel Test? [closed]

    - by Simon
    Possible Duplicate: Can an agile shop every really score 12 on the Joel Test? I really like the Joel test, use it myself, and encourage my staff and interviewees to consider it carefully. However I don't think I can ever score more than 9 because a few points seem to contradict the Agile Manifesto, XP and TDD, which are the bedrocks of my world. Specifically the questions about schedule, specs, testers and quiet working conditions run counter to what we are trying to create and the values that we have adopted in being genuinely agile. So my question is whether it is possible for a true Agile shop to score 12? [Note: I had this question closed on meta so I have re-posted here]

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  • how to hire the best programmers ?

    - by sh00
    I am going to apply Joel's method: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html I'm curious if is there anybody that used this method of hiring for long periods of time. Any comment could be useful. Thanks.

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  • beginning oop php question: do constructors take the place of getter?

    - by Joel
    I'm working through this tutorial: http://www.killerphp.com/tutorials/object-oriented-php/php-objects-page-3.php At first he has you create a setter and getter method in the class: <?php class person{ var $name; function set_name($new_name){ $this->name=$new_name; } function get_name(){ return $this->name; } } php?> And then you create the object and echo the results: <?php $stefan = new person(); $jimmy = new person(); $stefan ->set_name("Stefan Mischook"); $jimmy ->set_name("Nick Waddles"); echo "The first Object name is: ".$stefan->get_name(); echo "The second Object name is: ".$jimmy->get_name(); ?> Works as expected, and I understand. Then he introduces constructors: class person{ var $name; function __construct($persons_name) { $this->name = $persons_name; } function set_name($new_name){ $this->name=$new_name; } function get_name(){ return $this->name; } } And returns like so: <?php $joel = new person("Joel"); echo "The third Object name is: ".$joel->get_name(); ?> This is all fine and makes sense. Then I tried to combine the two and got an error, so I'm curious-is a constructor always taking the place of a "get" function? If you have a constructor, do you always need to include an argument when creating an object? Gives errors: <?php $stefan = new person(); $jimmy = new person(); $joel = new person("Joel Laviolette"); $stefan ->set_name("Stefan Mischook"); $jimmy ->set_name("Nick Waddles"); echo "The first Object name is: ".$stefan->get_name(); echo "The second Object name is: ".$jimmy->get_name(); echo "The third Object name is: ".$joel->get_name(); ?>

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  • Can someone clarify what this Joel On Software quote means?

    - by Bob
    I was reading Joel On Software today and ran across this quote: Without understanding functional programming, you can't invent MapReduce, the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable. The terms Map and Reduce come from Lisp and functional programming. MapReduce is, in retrospect, obvious to anyone who remembers from their 6.001-equivalent programming class that purely functional programs have no side effects and are thus trivially parallelizable. What does he mean when he says functional programs have no side effects? And how does this make parallelizing trivial?

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  • how to get 12 for joel test working in a small team of 3-4 on php website?

    - by keisimone
    Hi i read this inspired, i am asking for specific help to achieve a 12 for my current project. i am working in a team of 3-4 on a php project that is based on cakephp. i only have a dedicated server running on linux which i intend to have the website live on. and i have a plan with assembla where i am using its svn repository. that's it. i like to hear a major, impactful step towards answering each point raised by the joel test. by impactful i mean doing just this one thing would raise my project to scoring or close to scoring on that area of the joel test. lets begin: 1) do you have a source control system? I am very proud to say learning how to use svn even though we know nuts about branch/release policies made the biggest impact to our programming lives. and the svn repos is on assembla paid plan. Feel free to add if anyone thinks we can do more in this area. 2) Can you make a build in one step? i think the issue is how do i define as a build? i think we are going to define it as if tomorrow my dedicated server crashed and we found another server from another normal hosting provider and all my team's machines all destroyed, how are we going to get the website up again? my code is in svn on assembla. 1 step means as close to 1 button to push as possible. 3)Do you make daily builds? i know nothing about this. please help. i googled and came across this phpundercontrol. but i am not sure if we can get that to work with assembla. are there easier ways? 4)Do you have a bug database? we have not used the assembla features on bug tracking. ashamed to say. i think i will sort this out myself. 5)Do you fix bugs before writing new code? policy issue. i will sort it out myself. 6)Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Working on it. Same as above. estimates have historically been overly optimistic. having spent too much time using all sorts of funny project management tools, i think this time i am going to use just paper and pen. please dont tell me scrum. i need to keep things even simpler than that. 7)Do you have a spec? We do, but its in paper and pen. what would be a good template? 8)Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Well we work at home and in distributed manner. so .. 9)Do you use the best tools money can buy? We use cheap tools. we are not big. 10)Do you have testers? NO testers. Since we have a team of 3, i think i should go get 1 tester. even on a part time basis. so i should get this 1 part time tester test in what manner to extract maximum effects? should i get him to write out the test scenarios and expected outcomes and then test it? or i write the test scenarios and then ask him to do it? we will be writing the test cases ourselves using simpletest. i came across selenium. how useful is that? 11)Do new candidates write code during their interview? Not applicable. But i will do it next time i try to hire anyone else. hires or contractors alike. 12)Do you do hallway usability testing? Will do so on a per month or per milestone basis. i will grab my friends who are not net-savvy. they will be the best testers of this type. Thank you.

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