Joel on Software

2000/10/02

When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs. It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, but nobody does.

This week, I'll be talking in depth about functional specifications: what they are, why you should write them, how you should write them, and so on. We'll start today with Part One: Why Bother?

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

Want to know more?

You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make Trello, easy web-based collaboration software, FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracking and software development tool, and Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.