Passing The Joel Test In The PHP World

Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World

Who am I?

Lorna Mitchell
PHP Developer at Ibuildings
Personal site http://lornajane.net
European Rep for phpwomen.org
PHPNW organiser
Twitter: @lornajane

Who is Joel?

Joel Spolsky
Founder of Fog Creek Software
Blogs at http://joelonsoftware.com
Author of numerous books, particularly Best Software Writing
Co-founder of http://stackoverflow.com

What is the Joel Test?

12 questions about your organisation
"... a highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team"
Rule-of-thumb for best practice
How does it apply to PHP?

The Joel Test (1-6)

Do you use source control?
Can you make a build in one step?
Do you make daily builds?
Do you have a bug database?
Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Do you have an up-to-date schedule?

The Joel Test (7-12)

Do you have a spec?
Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Do you have testers?
Do new candidates write code during their interview?
Do you do hallway usability testing?

What is the Joel Test For?

Scoring your current organisation
Improving your current organisation
Scoring your next organisation

http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com

Comparison Scores

Microsoft: 12/12
Ibuildings: 8 or 9
eZ Components: 8 or 9
Red Embedded: 10
Your organisation … ?

Source Control

Central storage
Change history
Enables collaboration
Manage multiple versions

Source Control Solutions

CVS

http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/

Subversion (svn)

http://subversion.tigris.org/

Git

http://git.or.cz/

Bazaar (bzr)

http://www.bazaar-vcs.org/

Traditional Source Control user repo user user user

Distributed Source Control repo repo repo repo repo

Distributed Source Control

Local machine has repository
Has full history
Commit locally
Commit globally later

Recommendations subversion Developers using command line IDE plugins git-svn, bzr-svn bridges Designers using TortoiseSVN Managers using WebSVN

Resources

git-svn

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-svn.html

bzr-svn

http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrForeignBranches/Subversion

WebSVN

http://www.websvn.info/

TortoiseSVN

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Ask Me This In The Bar

Branching
Tagging
Versions

PHP is Interpreted

So do we care about builds?

What's in a Build?

Code compilation
Document generation
Test suite execution and feedback
Application deployment
Packaging

Deployment Scripts
Rollback
Databases

Sounds like Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration

A running process
Responds to commit (and/or hooks)
Performs tasks
Gives feedback

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration Solutions

Hudson https://hudson.dev.java.net/
phpUnderControl http://phpundercontrol.org/
Xinc http://sourceforge.net/projects/xinc/

COMPULSORY

I have a personal bug tracker

Bug Trackers

Capture features/tasks
Who does what?
Progress for each task, keep updated
Can reallocate items

Bug Tracker Solutions

Trac http://trac.edgewall.org/
Mantis http://www.mantisbt.org/
Jira http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
Eventum http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Eventum/
Hosted Options

github
sourceforge

Joel Says

Keep bugs near to zero
Cannot estimate bug fix time
Minimise unknowns

Capturing Bugs

As a minimum, record bug
Buggy behaviour
Expected behaviour
Smallest possible replication case

How to Report a Bug

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

it's not worth reporting that the program generated an error unless you can also report what the error message was. if a computer does anything unexpected, freeze Some of the worst bug reports I've ever seen come from programmers Try to remember as much detail as you can about what you were doing to it when it did fall over, and if you see any patterns, mention them. Anything you can provide has to be some help.

Scheduling Workflow collect requirements write specification separate into discrete tasks estimate task duration

Who Estimates?