CONCEPT
The Joel Test and Its AI-Era Successor
Spolsky's 2000 twelve-question checklist for evaluating software team quality — blunt, binary, deliberately oversimplified — and the five-question AI-era successor this volume proposes, designed to make visible the diagnostic capability that daily productivity metrics conceal.
In August 2000, Joel Spolsky published 'The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code,' a deliberately oversimplified checklist that allowed any software team to evaluate itself in five minutes on twelve binary questions: do you use source control? can you make a build in one step? do you fix bugs before writing new code? The test's power was its accessibility — it required no specialized knowledge to administer, produced a score out of twelve that was immediately legible, and created a shared vocabulary that teams could use to identify and argue for improvements. Over two decades it became one of the most cited heuristics in software engineering. This volume proposes a five-question AI-era successor, designed not to evaluate general team quality but to measure the specific capability that AI-generated code erodes and that only deliberate practice preserves.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The original Joel Test asked