Take this test to improve your development process

Test 1
Score Test 1

Test 2
Score Test 2

Got good people? Use these tests developed for SoftwareSuccess.com check your environment. Are you are providing the best environment possible to leverage their talent at your company.

Test 1: The Engineering Process

1.	The CEO (or CTO) gets a great idea, goes directly to the programmers, and gets coding started.	Yes	No
2.	Marketing or sales people add features to on-going projects in order to meet the needs of prospects.	Yes	No
3.	You've stated your top three priorities for each project and how each supports a specific business goal.	Yes	No
4.	You have established a publishable date when the next release of your project is due.	Yes	No
5.	You have every reason to believe, based on past history, that you will make the date within five working days.	Yes	No
6.	You document in some way what will be in each release before design begins.	Yes	No
7.	You document in some way what will be in each release before coding begins.	Yes	No
8.	You storyboard or prototype your graphical user interface.	Yes	No
9.	Programmers are the final testers of their own projects.	Yes	No
10.	Your project plan includes time for interdepartmental sign-off on specs, code review, testing, docs and docs review.	Yes	No
11.	You use a source code control system.	Yes	No
12.	You have systems in place that control the separation of development code from released code.	Yes	No
13.	After you give your programmer a project, you check back in a couple of weeks to ask, "How is it going?"	Yes	No
14.	You track and fix bugs before the code is turned over to QA for final system testing.	Yes	No
15.	Programmers write documentation for end-users.	Yes	No
16.	Your engineers are working with the tools of their choice.	Yes	No

Score yourself on Test 1: The Engineering Process

Give yourself 1 point for each "yes" answer to questions #3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, and 16.
Subtract 1 point for each "yes" answer to questions #1, 2, 13, and 15.
Add 2 points for a "yes" answer to question #5.
Subtract 2 points for a "yes" answer to question #9.

What your score means
10 to 12 points: You can attract the best people and they will be able to produce for you immediately. Congratulations on a job well-done.
5 to 9 points: You're generally supportive of programmers who want to contribute to your company. To keep the real professionals for a long time and to get the most out of them, don't stop improving.
-2 to 4 points: You are seriously hampering your programmer productivity. What's worse, in this condition you probably can't tell who's really contributing and who isn't. It's highly unlikely that you will land and keep a hotshot.
-3 to -6 points: You must have a great market, because your success is not from programmer productivity. The good news is that you could be even more profitable by taking just a few initiatives to improve your engineering department.

Test 2: The Engineering Environment

1.	Does your engineering team celebrate when a new release is complete?	Yes	No
2.	Do you have a team of bright people?	Yes	No
3.	Do you have a "cowboy" generating most of the code and a couple of "stable hands" cleaning up before a release?	Yes	No
4.	Does the owner of the company give personal recognition to a job well done?	Yes	No
5.	Do you have a person who is nice but not really pulling his/her weight?	Yes	No
6.	Do you hold regular status meetings even when there are no issues to resolve?	Yes	No

Score yourself on Test 2: The Engineering Environment

Give yourself 1 point for each "yes" answer to questions #1 and 4.
Subtract 1 point for each "yes" answer to questions #5 and 6.
Add 2 points for a "yes" answer to #2
Subtract 2 points for a "yes" answer to #3.

What your score means
3 to 4 points: Congratulations - you have a good, maybe great, working environment. Your staff is likely to stay with you and refer their friends to you.
-1 to 2 points: Start making changes now. Some should be easy. You will be rewarded with productivity and you'll get more internal referrals.
-4 to -2 points: Your environment is stifling. People will leave the first change they get. Is that what you want? If not, now's the time to make changes.

Note: These tests first appeared in an article for SoftwareSuccess.com Volume 15 Number 25, July 2, 2001. Editor-in-Chief, Bruce Hadley worked with Susan Haumeder to distill her experience in client assessment into the two tests that appear here. SoftwareSuccess.com in now part of SoftwareCEO.com , owned by CompTIA. Susan continues to be a moderator of the R&D and QA forum. Take a look. It's an active and very helpful community.