I'm a big fan of Joel Spolsky, author of the software blog, "Joel On Software". One of my favorite JOS articles is called "The Joel Test". This is a quick and dirty, 12 point test to see how good your development shop is. For fun, I ran down this list and evaluated it next to Endeavor's OpenFISMA team.

1. Do you use source control? YES
2. Can you make a build in one step? YES
3. Do you make daily builds? YES (After every commit, in fact!)
4. Do you have a bug database? YES (We use Atlassian Jira, which kicks butt)
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? YES (See our Development Priorities)
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? YES
7. Do you have a spec? YES (See our documentation)
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? KINDA -- But we're not big fans of quiet, anyway :)
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? YES
10. Do you have testers? YES
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? YES
12. Do you do hallway usability testing? NO

So, all in all, we're at 10.5 of 12 as of November, 2009. Looks like we need to start doing hallway usability testing.

Anyway, I thought this might provide an interesting look at how our open source development team compares with typical commercial shops.