NthCode Now Gets a 10/12 on the Joel Test

Joel Spolsky writes Joel on Software, a well-known software development blog that he started after founding Fog Creek Software in Manhattan in 2000. Joel is highly regarded for his well thought out pieces on what does and doesn’t work in finding and organizing talented software developers to create great products. Joel has has done well enough with his blog that he’s been able to turn his writing into five books.

One of my favorite of Joel’s blogs is The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. In it, Joel lays out a set of questions with simple yes/no answers you can use to determine the quality a given software organization.

Example: “Do candidates write code during interviews?”

No? Yes? Sometimes? By the Joel Test, having candidates write code during interviews is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating great software. At NthCode, much due to Joel’s writings on the subject, the answer has always been, “Yes.”

Over the past half year, we’ve steadily climbed the scale up to a 9/12. The, finally, last Friday, we installed the Redmine bug tracking software at dev.nthcode.com so that we can start formally tracking NthCode Player issues (before we were using post-it notes on a scrum whiteboard). This finally gets us to a 10/12 on the Joel Test.

According to Joel:

“A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.”

So we still need to start doing Hallway Usability Testing and hire a full-time tester to get a perfect score. But don’t worry, we’ll get there.

Why Redmine?

I spent two days digging through the Internet to find out which issue tracker was right for us — I also checked trac, Bugzilla, Mantis, and a couple others — and decided on Redmine because of its’ clean design, efficient workflow, and user-perceived speed. Redmine is a web-based Ruby on Rails application that includes a Wiki and message boards on top of its issue tracker. We will use all these features going forward.

If you’ve used an issue tracker in the past, you might enjoy spending just a few moments taking a look at our Redmine install over at dev.nthcode.com. It’s nice and working great.

Now to start copying those bugs from the post-it notes into Redmine.