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Changes are hard. I recently mentioned that. But changes are also necessary. I will now share with you some advice I have about the subject of implementing a change - starting to use unit-tests and TDD at your workplace. You should have some experience with unit-tests yourself before moving your entire team to TDD. Is the architecture your team using even testable? Can you understand the usage of a mocking framework? If you don't come with the knowledge to the team, you're in a world of hurt...
I believe that there is a step that every developer must take. For lack of a better term, I will call it the Plunge into Knowledge. I've seen it happening many times, and it happened to me as well. You start your development life by doing your job. You get a task, you do it. If you hit a snag, you turn to one of your co-workers for advice. If they hadn't yet taken the Plunge themselves, they will give you the best answer they have, an answer they probably received from someone else who used...
I've finally finished reading the excellent Peopleware book, and would like to share with you some of the notes I wrote to myself while I was reading it. Here we go (erm, spoilers up ahead, I guess...). Projects fail because of people (politics, communication, etc.), not because of technology. And yet we spend so much of our time worrying about this software or that tool instead of dedicating our time to the most important thing: taking care of our people. Working overtime for long periods of time...
I am currently reading Steve McConnell's great Rapid Development book, in which the author marks "wishful thinking" as one of the greatest mistakes one can make in software development. McConnell managed to express in two words the root of most problems in this field, and probably the main cause of most of my own mistakes. You know how it is. Sometimes you wish yourself to succeed. "Sure I can make it in a week". "So what if we have two weeks to complete a two months work...