Most developers have heard of "The Joel Test" to help improve the quality of their software and the processes surrounding it. Joshua Thijssen has taken this one step further and created his own set of questions to act as a test for software development managers to make sure they're doing the right things for their group.

This post is not so much for developers as it is for the managers and bosses from those developers. As you probably know by now, managing software engineers (or programmers) is not an easy task. They just don't like to play by the rules you always took for granted. Why is that? Why are those pesky programmers too hard to handle? Why is it so hard to sit down, write code and shut up??

The questions are yes/no and, at the end of the test, your questions will be assigned to points from 0 to 12. Here's just a few of the questions (they all come with summaries to help you understand what its asking):

• Do you work with lenient working hours?
• Do you give enough time for planning?
• Do you enforce an IDE?
• Are your programmers in the loop?
• Do you have enough distraction for programmers?