Are you doing it wrong? A checklist for software development.

are-you-doing-it-wrong-test.md

Are you doing it wrong?

This was inspired by

• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
• http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/58661/can-an-agile-shop-really-score-12-on-the-joel-test

My random list

If you can check everything on this list, congratulations, you are doing it right!

• Do you have a documentation which tells exactly what your product is?

  You will explain the project to new members anyways, just document what you tell them.

• Are you proud of your codebase?

• Are your co-workers proud of the codebase?

• Do you have a start here documentation for new project members?

• Is your start here documentation so good that you don't need to explain it further?

• Can you refactor your code without fearing that your app won't work?

• Do you have strict conventions about project style(tab/space, indent, naming)

  If you don't eventually your code will be a mess of different styles:

  • Diffs will be polluted by mix of spaces and tabs
  • Code is hard to read

• Do you know how outdated your project's dependencies are?

  You should have a single meter like: 6/10 of dependencies are outdated

• Would you be comfortable to show your code to other team members?

  If not, are you coding crap?

• Can every member of your team handle rough critic of their code?

  Everyone should be able to handle comments like:

  • "Your code looks like shit, because ..."
  • "Your technical choice was bad, because ..."

  If not, members are afraid to give feedback and code will eventually rotten.

Web development related

• Do you version your product?

  If you don't have a version, you'll eventually be confused what version is deployed to staging/test/prod.

• Do you have deployment scripts in version control?

• Do you know how outdated your hosting servers are?

• Can you easily replicate testing/staging/production environment locally for testing?