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The original Joel Test was a piece of content marketing by Joel Splosky, the CEO of the company that builds FogBugz among other tools for collaboration among so

The original Joel Test was a piece of content marketing by Joel Splosky, the CEO of the company that builds FogBugz among other tools for collaboration among software engineers. This appears to be the same. We should evaluate it its merits: Are these useful questions to ask in pursuit of a more productive and less frustrated data science team?

mseebach 10y ago
I don't see the need to make the Joel Test sound so nefarious. The Joel Test was content marketing, yes, but not of the FogBugz tool (while a bug database is item 4 out of 12, he doesn't even plug FogBugz in the item - it was a recruitment piece more than a sales piece). The reason we're still talking about the test is that it really struck a chord - it listed practices that were true and important, but not widely held to be so. Today, it's mostly redundant, because those practices are now totally uncontroversial standard industry practice, but it's worth dwelling on the fact that not too long ago you could "content market" recruiting developers by promising them source control systems and an Excel sheet of bugs.
- di4na 10y ago
  Don't go too fast. It is widespread in the startup world. In entreprisey world not so much. Here we have no version control, no continuous build and bugs never get solved. Don't even think about Hall testing. And the people that hired me asked no question about my coding ability nor my Github account. And it is not a small company, nor an isolated thing. And don't ask about the tooling, i spend my days fighting it... not being able to use package manager due to bad proxy is a PITA. The Joel Test is still on my list of things to check with every company that want to hire me now. Because i see what happen when it is not respected every day...
- afarrell 10y ago
  I don't intend to make it sound nefarious. Lots of people were saying that this piece was a sales piece as if it should be dismissed. I actually love well-written content marketing as it is often highly educational. Other examples include: - DigitalOcean paying people to write tutorials on server configuration - MIT paying students to write blog posts on life at MIT - Ksplice writing a post on the uses of strace.
djcjgshjjc 10y ago
One of the points in particular seems highly dependant on the product category you are analyzing: ability to put data science models into production. You might be working on some product that can't dynamically respond to stimuli as that seems to imply. My team's work influences product decisions frequently, but it would be contrived to actually deploy our models to the product in many cases. Another that may not apply is the stuff about reproducing past experiments. Suppose your experment platform is programmatic and interfaces with some codebase. Old feature flags are a form of tech debt that should be removed. So old experiment code is sitting in a repo history somewhere but not necessarily deployable.

mseebach 10y ago

I don't see the need to make the Joel Test sound so nefarious. The Joel Test was content marketing, yes, but not of the FogBugz tool (while a bug database is item 4 out of 12, he doesn't even plug FogBugz in the item - it was a recruitment piece more than a sales piece). The reason we're still talking about the test is that it really struck a chord - it listed practices that were true and important, but not widely held to be so. Today, it's mostly redundant, because those practices are now totally uncontroversial standard industry practice, but it's worth dwelling on the fact that not too long ago you could "content market" recruiting developers by promising them source control systems and an Excel sheet of bugs.

di4na 10y ago
Don't go too fast. It is widespread in the startup world. In entreprisey world not so much. Here we have no version control, no continuous build and bugs never get solved. Don't even think about Hall testing. And the people that hired me asked no question about my coding ability nor my Github account. And it is not a small company, nor an isolated thing. And don't ask about the tooling, i spend my days fighting it... not being able to use package manager due to bad proxy is a PITA. The Joel Test is still on my list of things to check with every company that want to hire me now. Because i see what happen when it is not respected every day...
afarrell 10y ago
I don't intend to make it sound nefarious. Lots of people were saying that this piece was a sales piece as if it should be dismissed. I actually love well-written content marketing as it is often highly educational. Other examples include: - DigitalOcean paying people to write tutorials on server configuration - MIT paying students to write blog posts on life at MIT - Ksplice writing a post on the uses of strace.

djcjgshjjc 10y ago

One of the points in particular seems highly dependant on the product category you are analyzing: ability to put data science models into production. You might be working on some product that can't dynamically respond to stimuli as that seems to imply. My team's work influences product decisions frequently, but it would be contrived to actually deploy our models to the product in many cases. Another that may not apply is the stuff about reproducing past experiments. Suppose your experment platform is programmatic and interfaces with some codebase. Old feature flags are a form of tech debt that should be removed. So old experiment code is sitting in a repo history somewhere but not necessarily deployable.