Sneaking in development enhancements
Somewhere on a page of Joel Spolsky or one linking to it I stumbled across the comment that if you want to improve your software development but have to fear refusal from your colleagues you should try some creeping methods.
Today I tried that and "forgot" a copy of The Joel Test at a prominent place, right next to the coffee machine. Perhaps some people will take a look when they are recharging their energy with caffeine and unconsciously pick up a meme from it.
In the long term my goal is to have an influence in our process of software development so that we can enhance our overall quality and maintainability. Perhaps I can even get my foot into the newly re-founded Software Quality Team, currently only represented by one person.
I have so many ideas, some of them surely worth a deeper evaluation:
- enhance/update our task management system, so that we can more easily keep up with Bugzillas development
- set up a better automated build machine, better integration with CVS (Tinderbox?)
- enhance our make-scripts for faster from-scratch-building
- use php templates in our web administration interface for easier customization and maintenance
- use Eclipse IDE for most of our development tasks (C++, PHP, etc.)
- ...
Gaaahh, my head is bursting of dozens of small ideas how to improve development. Just have to convince the right people...