Tools to help a small shop score higher on the “Joel Test”

Question

Questions #1 through #4 on the Joel Test in my opinion are all about the development tools being used and the support system in place for developers:

1. Do you use so

Answer 1

My preferred stack:

1) Subversion. I'm intrigued about distributed source control but haven't had chance to try any in anger yet. For a centralized solution svn is rock solid.

2) Ant. Maven is a joy to use when it's working but as an old ant hacker I find maven to be hard to follow once things go wrong.

3) Hudson. Not been mentioned so far but definitely worth investigating. Incredibly usable and actively maintained tool. PreviousLy we paid for Anthill Pro which seemed flakey and was painful to fix each time it screwed up.

4) We pay for jira. Not cheap but much more usable than the open source options we looked at and very flexible too.