How do I convince my boss that The Joel Test is credible and should be followed?

Question

I find The Joel Test to be a nice, straightforward tool to diagnose a company. I just ran it on my company and we scored 5/12, its time to improve or we are out of business. I want to bring up The Joel Test on our next meeting with our boss, who has no programming experience.

How do I best convince him that The Joel Test is a good standard to adopt, besides rational arguments like productivity loss? Rather, I look for referencing famous persons, books etc that praise it, buzz words or other ad hominem arguments that might convince my boss.

Answer 1

Potentially your boss won't care but you can also mention that Joel tried this and succeeded so he's not making this thing up. Also almost every known successful software doing these one way or another so pick 5 of them and show them as examples.

Beside of that I think focusing the money and obvious short - long term effects will get their attention.

Answer 2

our boss, who has no programming experience

My humble guess is that non programmers won't understand the Joel test. I guess the test is more useful for team leaders that are also programmers.

Here's a tip: try having some person (maybe you?) responsible for some small scale software project and have that person apply the Joel Test on that project. Then show how it improved (or not...) the overall code quality, delivery time, etc. Proven results are much more convincing than referencing famous persons.

Answer 3

I wouldn't waste your time.

Bosses get bombarded frequently by people professing to be experts (MBAs and such) in various fields and attempting to impose their metrics on poor unsuspecting targets.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Joel's stuff, but has the Joel test ever been seriously tested? Until it's been through some rigid correlation with blindingly successful (scoring high) and dismally failing (scoring low) test cases, it's just one guy's thoughts.

So why should anyone take any notice of it?

Answer 4

Don't.

Convincing someone who probably never heard of the guy that we should all follow The Teachings of the Great Joel Spolsky seems like a very inefficient way of convincing your boss that in order to do your job well you should have things like build servers, quiet offices and good tools.

If you want a build server then convince your boss of the benefits of having a build server. If you want a quiet office then tell your boss that you work better that way. If you can't convince your boss that way then you won't impress him referring to a list of points from someone he never heard of.

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@Pax: You have two options to convince a manager to implement Joels list. You can sell the list or you can sell Joel. I was just trying to reflect how the second option will sound to a manager. :-)

Answer 5

Don't waste time changing people's minds.

Instead, do the following.

1. Apply the Joel test.

2. Find things in your organization that are broken, and the breakage is identified by the Joel test. Not everything that's broken is identified by the Joel test. Not every failure in the Joel test is actually something broken. People cope and compensate really well.

3. Rank the broken things in order of fixability.

4. Fix one thing.

5. Document the connection between the Joel test and the fix.

6. Repeat the process on the new organization.

Don't waste time educating your boss. Fix things. Your boss is on their own to lead, follow or get out of your way.

Answer 6

"or other ad hominem arguments that might convince my boss"

No ad hominem argument should convince anyone ever, that's rather the point.