The Briceicle Test: 12 Steps to Better Technical Leadership
18 years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote The Joel Test, 12 questions to quickly rate the quality of a software development team. The great thing about The Joel Test is that it’s easy to get a quick yes or no answer to each question, and it takes about 3 minutes to use. The Joel Test has been used to help software engineers evaluate their own team, as well as teams they were interviewing at.
Today I propose The Briceicle Test 😄, a simple test to gauge engineering leadership. You can use it to measure your own team, or to measure a team you’re considering joining.
The Briceicle Test
- Do you have regular 1:1 meetings?
- Do engineering managers code less than 20% of the time?
- Are engineering processes measured and continuously improved (e.g. on-boarding, development, deployment, etc)?
- Are bugs, technical debt and refactoring tracked and openly discussed?
- Does senior management view addressing technical debt as an ongoing and necessary process?
- Are mistakes expected, and experiments encouraged, to allow the team to learn (i.e. psychological safety)?
- Are there clear, documented engineering practices & values the team lives by?
- Does the team estimate work regularly?
- Does the team influence hiring decisions?
- Are poor performers dealt with effectively?
- Can engineers interact with users/customers?
- Are the QA engineers integrated with the development teams?
Each question is a simple yes or no question. Score a point for each YES
Like the Joel Test , a score of 12 is perfect, and 11 is tolerable. But 10 or lower and you’ve got problems. The truth is that most engineering organizations are running with a score below 10, but we need to care and raise the bar because companies like Google likely run at 12 full-time.
Disagree? Anything I missed? Please leave a comment below.
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