Some of the social issues are difficult to address without extensive insider knowledge of your particular company and culture. Some easy outsider advice though

Some of the social issues are difficult to address without extensive insider knowledge of your particular company and culture. Some easy outsider advice though is the 'Joel test'. Written in 2000, its a bit out of date, but there are more modern versions of it floating around the internet (such as the one that follows). Basically it is a checklist for a good development environment. In my experience it is fine to miss one or two of these, and some are n/a based on what you are building. But if you find you are missing of half-assing a lot of these, seemingly unrelated employee satisfaction issues will start to pop up. 1. Are all builds handled automatically by a Continuous Integration server? 2. Do you make and use daily builds? 3. Do you use an issue tracker? 4. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? 5. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? 6. Do you have up to date information on your products performance and usage? 7. Do you use the best tools money can buy? 8. Do you have a comprehensive test plan? 9. Do you have dedicated UI and UX designers? 10. Does all code go through code review? 11. Do you have coding standards? 12. Are new employees given training? 13. Can you download the code base and run it in one step? 14. Do engineers have the strongest say in their time estimates? 15. Do engineers choose the tools and architecture for what they are building?