I agree with the points re: subjectivity, but I do feel the Joel test is somewhat outdated, if only because everything on there has become table stakes rather than genuine differentiators.

A 12/12 on the Joel test doesn't mean you're a great company, it means you're not a total garbage fire.

I'm not going to presume I can come up with a whole new test on the spot, but I'd expect a "modern" Joel test to have questions like:

- Do you use CI? - Do you deploy changes individually? - Is your code coverage > (some amount)

>I agree with the points re: subjectivity, but I do feel the Joel test is somewhat outdated, if only because everything on there has become table stakes rather than genuine differentiators.

This might be, but there are a whole lot of companies in the world that can't even make table stakes.

Some questions from the Joel test do sound a bit dated - understandably, it's a 20-year-old post at this point.

For example, if you were writing the list today "do you make daily builds" would probably have updated to "do you build and test every merge into master"