People not respecting good practices at workplace

Question

Hi guys,

             There are some major issues in my company regarding practices, procedures and methodologies.

First of all, we're a small firm and there are only 3-4 developers, one of which is our boss who isn't really a programmer, he just chimes in now and then and tries to do code some simple things.

The biggest problems are:

   1.

      Major cowboy coding and lack of methodologies. I've tried explaining to everyone the benefits of TDD and unit testing, but I only got weird looks as if I'm talking nonsense. Even the boss gave me the reaction along the lines of "why do we need that? it's just unnecessary overhead and a waste of time".
   2.

      Nobody uses design patterns. I have to tell people not to write business logic in code behind, I have to remind them not to hardcode concrete implementations and dependencies into classes and cetera. I often feel like a nazi because of this and people think I'm enforcing unnecessary policies and use of design patterns.
   3.

      The biggest problem of all is that people don't even respect common sense security policies. I've noticed that college students who work on tech support use our continuous integration and source control server as a dump to store their music, videos, series they download from torrents and so on. You can imagine the horror when I realized that most of the partition reserved for source control backups was used by entire seasons of TV series and movies.
   4.

      Our development server isn't even connected to an UPS and surge protection. It's just plugged straight into the wall outlet. I asked the boss to buy surge protection, but he said it's unnecessary.

All in all, I like working here because the atmosphere is very relaxed, money is good, but I simply don't know how to explain to people that they need to stick to some standards and good practices in IT industry and that they can't behave so irresponsibly.

Thanks......................................................

Answer 1

I work at a similiar small company, except I've been here for ten years and now I'm a partner in charge of all software development. In my time here we've gone from being an Access and ASP classic shop with no source control to an extremely competent, ever-evolving .Net shop with some big name clients like Citrix and Wyndham.

We got here... Slowly. And there is still work to be done. Also, it wasn't all me - I work with some brilliant people. I tried to be a good example, and I forced our organization to learn from the bad situations caused by our practices.

Here's the thing: craftsmanship, or the lack thereof, is cultural. You might be 10% of the culture over there, so if you lead by example you can make things happen. A lot of the culture comes down from the top, so I would try pitching some ideas to your boss -- things that will clearly improve efficiency or save money. Don't focus on TDD which is so contraversial at the moment that I understand they recently changed the name. TDD is awesome but it's a big change, and it's too easy to say that it's expensive and just dismiss it. Focus instead on easy wins. We don't do TDD here but I've gotten automated unit testing widely adopted. Maybe that will become TDD some day. Things like that.

Just don't be obnoxious. We nerds have big egos. If your co-workers feel like you're looking down your nose at them, you will have a hard time getting any kind of buy-in.

Answer 2

Sounds like a fairly typical small company. Perhaps you'd be happier somewhere larger that cares about SEI practices. Boeing might be hurting these days, but I'm sure Lockheed is hiring.

The plus side of this is that it sounds like there's nobody there who would care too much if you implement the practices you find best. Make your own unit tests. Delete those movies and claim you were out of space on the disk if anyone comes and complains