Well, remember that he's selling bugtracking software. ;-) Many of Joel's articles are very good, but remember that they are designed to sell his product.
You do need *some* sort of bug tracking system, but I've never found one that I like. I've used Bugzilla, Mantis, FogBugz (Joel's product) and reported on Jira, Sun's bugtracking system, and SourceForge, but the only one I halfway-liked was Jira. At work, I use pencil & paper along with fixing bugs as they're reported. For my startup, I'll likely roll up some custom solution, as I haven't seen anything that comes close to meeting our requirements. I'll take a second look at what's out there first, though - I've heard good things about Trac, and maybe someone somewhere has come up with a decent bugtracker.
You do need *some* sort of bug tracking system, but I've never found one that I like. I've used Bugzilla, Mantis, FogBugz (Joel's product) and reported on Jira, Sun's bugtracking system, and SourceForge, but the only one I halfway-liked was Jira. At work, I use pencil & paper along with fixing bugs as they're reported. For my startup, I'll likely roll up some custom solution, as I haven't seen anything that comes close to meeting our requirements. I'll take a second look at what's out there first, though - I've heard good things about Trac, and maybe someone somewhere has come up with a decent bugtracker.