4 ms·

Right, I've been thinking about this as an extension to the Joel Test (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/a

by bwh2 17y ago

Right, I've been thinking about this as an extension to the Joel Test (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html). Good point on asking about finances.

hga 17y ago
Yeah, the Joel test [1] is very good, but I confounded it with another that includes, I think at the end, "after action" analysis of projects. It's not ideal to be in a company that doesn't learn from its mistakes and inevitably forgets how to do things right.... [1] I thought most of it was "obvious", but #5, "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?" wasn't something I'd explicitly realized the critical importance of. Heh, notice the beginning of it starts with an after action project analysis. Hmmm, I just reviewed the list, some time after I read the comments to Mini-Microsoft's posting on why Vista development failed so badly, and I can see where Microsoft stopped doing too many of things that Joel said they were all doing back in 2000. This is not the place to get into a long essay on that, but by my count: 5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? (Similar sort of failure, e.g. a lot of bugs were officially closed when they weren't really fixed.) 7. Do you have a spec? (Joel wrote an essay on how it took N people one year to mis-design the Vista logout? feature.) 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? (Developers had to spend at least one day a week keeping their Vista machines up to date. And the development process (which is a tool of sorts, think of turning a crank on the side of a box to push through something) was so bad, so convoluted, so difficult to push things through, that developers spent a whole lot less time on coding et. al. than they should have.) 10. Do you have testers? (RIFFed in favor of "automation" that seldom happened. They also abandoned the Raymond Chen backwards compatibility "cult" and that whole function and its people.) One bottom line is that I'm still amazed at how under resourced such a vital project was (Vista, the restart from the Windows Server code base after the .NET Longhorn attempt was canceled).

by bwh2 17y ago

hga 17y ago

Yeah, the Joel test [1] is very good, but I confounded it with another that includes, I think at the end, "after action" analysis of projects. It's not ideal to be in a company that doesn't learn from its mistakes and inevitably forgets how to do things right.... [1] I thought most of it was "obvious", but #5, "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?" wasn't something I'd explicitly realized the critical importance of. Heh, notice the beginning of it starts with an after action project analysis. Hmmm, I just reviewed the list, some time after I read the comments to Mini-Microsoft's posting on why Vista development failed so badly, and I can see where Microsoft stopped doing too many of things that Joel said they were all doing back in 2000. This is not the place to get into a long essay on that, but by my count: 5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? (Similar sort of failure, e.g. a lot of bugs were officially closed when they weren't really fixed.) 7. Do you have a spec? (Joel wrote an essay on how it took N people one year to mis-design the Vista logout? feature.) 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? (Developers had to spend at least one day a week keeping their Vista machines up to date. And the development process (which is a tool of sorts, think of turning a crank on the side of a box to push through something) was so bad, so convoluted, so difficult to push things through, that developers spent a whole lot less time on coding et. al. than they should have.) 10. Do you have testers? (RIFFed in favor of "automation" that seldom happened. They also abandoned the Raymond Chen backwards compatibility "cult" and that whole function and its people.) One bottom line is that I'm still amazed at how under resourced such a vital project was (Vista, the restart from the Windows Server code base after the .NET Longhorn attempt was canceled).