Cielo Systems Inc

Submitted by Djun Kim on 12 February 2006 - 2:21pm. Joel Spolsky has become something of a legend among the current generation of software developers. His common-sense, tell-it-like-it-is, experience-rich, narrative teachings have helped tens of thousands of followers to better software and better software organizations, since well before the great dot-bust. If you're managing software projects and are not familiar with his ideas, you should be. Can you list six of the twelve questions on the Joel Test? No cheating, now! We can call this little meta-test the Djun Test. If you've failed, you would do well to schedule a day off, buy his book (Joel on Software - recently published by Apress), and have a quick read through. Don't stint with the highlighter, sticky bookmarks, marginal notes - research in 'brain-based learning' shows these will help you remember. And do the exercises. Does this sound like work? Yes, it is. But here's an incentive. Not only will your software projects and team benefit, but you will be in a better position to get free money. Pretty much every country that can afford it has programs to fund technology innovation, since this is such an economic driver. If you are managing software projects and you're not intimately familiar the innovation incentives available to you, what's holding you back? Believe me, your competitors are already taking advantage of this. Since I work in Canada, I'll focus on just one of the programmes available in here. If you are based elsewhere, you'll soon find the corresponding grants, tax credits, loans, or other funding mechanisms. The Canadian Scientific Research and Experimental Development investment tax credit, a.k.a. SR&ED, affectionately known as 'shred', refunds around half of qualified expenditures for properly managed research and development. For many small software companies, that's easily equal to profit from all other sources. I can't blame you if your eyes are glazing over at this point - most people don't associate 'taxes' with 'incentive'. The good news, though, is that qualifying for SR&ED is really about good communication and effective process - something we already strive for in our software, and our business, and something we should be pretty good at as developers and software managers, right? And, since we're developing software and not better milking machines or pre-fab igloos, we have some pretty nice tools to help us. Just for reference, here's the Joel test (you didn't peek here up in the second paragraph, did you?) -Can you make a build in one step? -Do you have a bug database? -Do you have an up-to-date schedule? -Do programmers have quiet working conditions? -Do you have testers? -Do you do hallway usability testing? From my SR&ED perspective, here's what these are about: The trick is to integrate these tools to be able to support the following: 1. Answer the good old question 'who did what, when'. Specifically, you need to relate a given hour of work on a given date to an R&D outcome or objective. In any given project, some work will be routine, and other work will be "R&D".