I discovered the Joel test recently and applied it to my team. However, I but found hard to apply some points to my company since we are developing small chips with both "wired" and programmable algorithm.
5: Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
Since we cannot patch the hardware/software once delivered, we cannot tolerate any know bug, and a whole team of senior developer are building tools used for tracking them. This point should be for example "do you have 2 different implementations for each of your products, and are you testing test against each other?"
12: Do you do hallway usability testing?
We don't develop UI. This point seems irrelevant.
How can we adapt this test to the kind of development we do?