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

Asked 2008-08-18T18:17:49.787
16

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 source control?
  2. Can you make a build in one step?
  3. Do you make daily builds?
  4. Do you have a bug database?

I'm just curious what free/cheap (but good) tools exist for the small development shops that don't have large bank accounts to use to achieve a positive answer on these questions.

For source control I know Subversion is a great solution, and if you are a one man shop you could even use SourceGear's Vault.

I use NAnt for my larger projects, but have yet to set up a script to build my installers as well as running the obfusication tools all as a single step. Any other suggestions?

If you can answer yes to the building in a single step, I think creating daily builds would be easy, but what tools would you recommend for automating those daily builds?

For a one or two man team, it's already been discussed on SO that you can use FogBugz On Demand, but what other bug tracking solutions exist for small teams?

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19
  1. source control: Subversion or Mercurial or Git
  2. build automation: NAnt, MSBuild, Rake, Maven
  3. continuous integration: CruiseControl.NET or Continuum or Jenkins
  4. issue tracking: Trac, Bugzilla, Gemini (if it must be .NET and free-ish)

Don't forget automated testing with NUnit, Fit, and WatiN.

answered 2008-08-18T18:25:23.437
2

My engineering stack:

  1. Git (I love GitHub, but Git doesn't require a hosted solution)
  2. Rake
  3. CruiseControl.rb
  4. FogBugz

No doubt these choices are influenced by my development stack, which most often includes Ruby, Rails, SQLite, Firefox, and OSX.

answered 2008-08-18T18:40:45.793

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