Can we make a Joel Anti-Test? Ideally, you want zero points. Cases: Uses Google+ Internally. Uses JIRA. Uses a VCS you have never heard of. Entire product is licensed from an outsourced shop and resold under your own branding. Extensive use of Windows desktops or servers. Uses one or more of {MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB} at scale. ...
No, we can't make a Joel Anti-Test. It's easy to say, from experience, what set of things nearly all good companies do. It's impossible to say from lack of experience what good companies don't do.
Have you used Google+ in a corporate setting? No? How can you know it's productivity negative? Have you used a VCS you've never heard of? Then how do you know it's a negative?
The very idea that you should enshrine your ignorance in a checklist of things companies must not do and software companies must not use is utterly preposterous, and you should be at least a little bit ashamed to have proposed it.
Really? I see heavy internal Google+ use as a good thing: it means people like each other enough to network internally.
Remember: G+ does not replace mailing lists (which you get with Groups); they're two different types of communication. Mailing lists are good for threaded discussions. G+ is good for "look at this thing I just made".
Not so much JIRA itself, but the ecosystem and culture that surround it. It tends to be corporate enterprise ware and a symptom of a top-down management driven structure. I'm not aware of any teams that chose JIRA on their own. It's also rather oriented to time tracking and micromanagement (or at least that's how my group is told to use it), leading to Bad Agile focusing on process not results.
It's not terrible to use, just mildly slow and clunky compared to other options like FogBugz or TFS.
My team picked JIRA after examining other options; we felt it was the best and most usable solution that wasn't a) Hosted or b) running on expensive alien software like Windows (we're a unix shop.)
