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12 Steps to Writing Better Web Code

I know that Chris and our team have been long-time admirer’s of Joel’s work at Fog Creek, and in a recent job post (we’re hiring a sysadmin!) I happened to notice that we score a healthy 11/12 on Joel’s Test as a software company ourselves.

Kelly Sutton, who Chris and I met several years ago at FOWA Miami while he was creating HackCollege, has his own version of these 12 steps that he’s written based on his recent experiences with building and launching LayerVault. He suggests that these are supplemental to Joel’s list, not a replacement, and we really like where he’s headed.

  1. Do you only deploy from one branch?
  2. Do you have a bootstrap script?
  3. Do all employees deploy code on their first day?
  4. Does each bug get a failing test?
  5. Is your bus factor greater than n/2, where n is the number of engineers?
  6. Can you spin up ad-hoc development and staging environments with one command?
  7. Does your team work around features, and not around sprints?
  8. Does all work get done on a branch?
  9. Do you actively remove deprecated code?
  10. Do bugs only exist in one place?
  11. Do you discourage the use of IDEs?
  12. Are discrepancies in process addressed before more code is written?

Kelly takes the time to expound on each of these questions on his post. How do you score? What would you like to be doing better? Are you using Beanstalk to achieve any of these goals? Let us know in the comments!

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from Beanstalk http://blog.beanstalkapp.com/post/12887092196/12-steps-to-writing-better-web-...