What sucks about your company's dev environment/philosophies?

- Who will I interact with most on a daily basis? (other devs, qa, ops, manager, customers?) - Is everyone in same office/building or are team members remote? If remote, what strategies and tools are in place to make it seamless? - Who is on a "team"? (just other devs? cross-functional? if so, does it include QA, BA, UX project management, ops or product management)? How do teams interact? - How is development organization success measured? - How is professional & personal development addressed by the organization?

- What is the platform? What tools are used? Is there integration between issue/task tracking & source code & builds? Using CI? - What is process/budget for procuring or updating additional productivity/developer tools and hardware? - Is there a development/QA/staging environment? Who maintains those?

- What development process is used? How long are cycles? How is it measured? Who is responsible for the process and the various activities in the process? - How does development process integrate with support/delivery/ops processes? - How is product roadmap and direction set? How are changes handled? - Who is responsible for overall architecture & UX? Who makes trade-off decisions? - How can I evaluate if I am being productive & effective in the organization? - Who will be most likely to give me feedback about code, features, contributions?

Re: testing comment - Ask "What is your definition of quality"? Is it related to meeting expected behaviors or do they use a narrow metric like bug count / severities? How are expected behaviors of the system established? Via written documentation, team discussions, etc? How are bugs reported, triaged, resolved? Via tool like Github, Jira, or TFS, or via Excel/email/verbal? Do bug reporters have access to tools for screen capture? Do application logs provide sufficient information?

The Joel Test

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? 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?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

Thanks Benlin. Good point.