Revisiting Joel's Test

Originally inspired by Joel Spolsky’s 2000 checklist for assessing software-team effectiveness, the proposed “Shelley Test” updates those principles for an era in which coding agents and large language models play a central role in development. It argues that teams should use adversarial agentic code review rather than routine peer review, deploy continuously under LLM supervision, maintain trustworthy end-to-end tests, and provide agents with queryable observability data that combines system metrics and business context. The framework also emphasizes access to leading AI models, rapid merge queues and CI to avoid attention-draining delays, and infrastructure that lets teams quickly create and iterate on internal tools and agents. It encourages continual team discussion of workflows as practices evolve, and concludes that products increasingly need to be operable by coding agents through accessible APIs, reliable authentication, and clear machine-readable documentation.

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