Hi Derek, <snip>
> In short, I would love any advice on how to do this. Other than > talking a lot with people, I'm going start up a Brown Bag lunch > session series (e.g. videos on Google Collections, use of git, and > learning Scala), documenting some of the practices in the small groups > I work with, and develop a website of some sort with a wiki and forums > to give a single location for people to look at for such information > (I was considering Drupal, but know bugger all about web tech - again, > recommendations greatly received). It sounds like you're already heading down the right track! The only way to get a large group of disparate developers to share some common tools and techniques is to get their ideas and their buy in! In terms of a central place to store all of this - there's a multitude of CMS/Wiki solutions out there. Drupal, MediaWiki, Joomla, Confluence, Trac and others will all do the trick. Just don't use Sharepoint ;). > My initial focus is to focus on spreading expertise and awareness, > though management is very receptive and wants actual collaboration, so > nothing about forcing the use of particular technologies or techniques > as yet. We mostly write in Java, so that's an advantage, but there's a > great deal of variety, even in areas like whether version control is > used (meep!), let alone what sort. So a great place to start (that also gets you some quick management wins) would be version control and build/CI. The best thing here is to simply set things up, show case it in a brown bag session and then _follow up_ with each developer/team to see if they're interested. As you rightly pointed out, forcing things on developers isn't really going to be very productive, you want the "Oh wow - that rocks, how do I get my project using that?" reaction. * So for version control I've found that I can keep centralised and distributed mindsets happy with a 'Git backed by SVN' installation. * With CI - Install a Jenkins/Hudson/Whatever and get your projects running on it - after a few demos at the brown bag sessions I suspect you'll find that most developers will want to get on board. * Build tools will probably also slowly congregate at this point - wouldn't it be nice if you could all build each other's projects without requiring specialist knowledge? * Similarly with discussing something like TDD. If you can set up a quick demo showing how you refactor code quickly without fear, you'll get more colleagues on board. I've found the key to this is to follow up gently and find out if the developer(s) are interested in what you've shown them. Usually a 1/2 day of working together gets their project(s) using version control, or that CI server, those tests or porting that data structure to Google collections. Most importantly you'll have a started a culture of collaboration, people are going to have a lot of fun and share cool ideas, you can't beat that :) > Anyway, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. HTH - and apologies if the tone is preachy, I'm in a strange writing frame of mind today. Cheers, Martijn -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
