Would Little Stream Software pass the Joel Test?  The Joel Test
is a great way to quickly test a software development team’s
performance, even if you are the only developer. I’ve been the
sole developer for Little Stream Software for over a year now,
so I think it’s a good time to rate how I’ve changed since my
“programmer as a cog in the machine” days.  1. Do you use source
control?  Yes. In fact I’m advocating using good (Subversion)
and great (Git) source control systems to my customers.  2. Can
you make a build in one step?  This would depend on the project.
The majority of the Ruby on Rails projects are built/deployed in
one step but most of my PHP projects take several steps. The
biggest hurdle is that several of my customers don’t see much
benefit from automation, which is a failure to educate on my
part. I know one project where I spent a considerable amount of
time automating the testing and database changes (think rake
db:migrate) and now it’s used by all the developers and on the
production systems