It's not bad, but it needs editing. The Joel Test is a hugely important document (for a blog post) because it's incisive. Spolsky could have added, "does your team ban sprintf, strcpy, and strcat" and then written a graf on buffer overflows. He didn't, because that's not one of the very few questions in the Joel Test.

The Joel Test isn't "if Joel Spolsky was designing a new dev team from scratch, here's his whole checklist". But this sysadmin test seems that way.

So in that spirit, here's my first wave of things I think you should cut:

(3) Plenty of very excellent ops team don't keep internal team metrics (other than availability stats). It's also too fuzzy.

(8) Prioritizing features over stability actually contradicts Joel on Software ("some bugs aren't worth fixing", to paraphrase). Saying that you prioritize one over the other is also a platitude. Axe this.

(9) Virtually every great dev team uses source control, has bug tracking, &c. Not every great ops team has "design docs" for every (or even any) project they undertake

(11) Similarly, an "opsdoc" for every service (the mini website with "how to rebuild this") is a nice-to-have, not a must have. How I know that is, I've never once met an ops team that actually has this.

(14) Dev/QA/Prod environments: I don't think you can axe this, but I think you got too aspirational, on two axes: first, most teams don't have dev AND QA AND prod (though every good ops team has at least a prod and a "something else" environment) and secondly, there are services that don't need this much rigor.

(22) Refresh policy for hardware? If it ain't broke, &c. Why does a good sysadmin team refresh hardware just for the hell of it? I remember when network admins used to be proud of keeping highly utilized networks running on the old ugly Cisco AGS+ boxes and made fun of the kids who bragged about their 7500s. This is too fuzzy to be part of a "test".

(23) Why do I care if servers stay up when one hard drive dies, as long as my service stays up even when a whole rack catches fire?

(28) Anti-malware? Really? In 2011? I'm sure you have a whole blog post to write about this, but if you have to justify it, maybe leave it out of your "test".

A suggestion for your document that also adds another acid test to things you should keep on the list: what's an ops team that everyone knows that kicks ass as a result of doing all these things? When Joel Spolsky wrote The Joel Test, he got to use Microsoft as a "12 out of 12" case. Who does all these things? Amazon? (Did I miss that in your document? I'm tipsy, sorry).

Hope that's constructive.