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

1. Git
2. Make
3. Cron
4. Trac

I'm a man of few syllables ;-)

Be sure to use some kind of version control where developers can easily create private branches willy-nilly, then take their private branch and squeeze it into a single commit on the main branch. That way, individual developers---as opposed to the organization---can get the benefits of version control without polluting anyone else's code (and slowing down their work) with broken commits.

This feature is what I like about git. I think it's only really present in distributed version control systems; using a DVCS doesn't mean you actually have to do distributed development, though.

Regarding one-step building, make is the default build tool and it works quite well for most tasks. I'd go with that unless you have a good reason not to.

You want daily builds, put the build command in your cron.daily. Set up a procmail hook to handle the mail from cron if need be.

For bug tracking, use $(apt-cache search bug tracking). Basically, as long as it says "bug tracker" on the box and you know other people are using it, it's probably going to work fine. Among the regulars are bugzilla, mantis and trac.