Ask Slashdot: Standard Software Development Environments? 362
First time accepted submitter sftwrdev97 writes "I have only been doing software development for about 5 years, and worked most of it at one company. I recently switched to a new company and am amazed at the lack of technology used in their development process. In my previous position, we used continuous integration, unit testing, automated regression testing, an industry standard (not open source) in version control, and tried to keep up with the latest tools, Java releases, etc. In the new position, there is no unit or regression testing, no continuous integration, compiled files are moved to the production environment basically by hand and there is no version control on them. The tools we are using have been unsupported for 5-7 years and we are still using old Java. I am just wondering since this is only my second job in the industry, is this the norm for most development environments? Or do most development environments try to keep up on technology or just use what ever gets them by?" What's it like in your neck of the woods?
Heh (Score:4, Interesting)
Welcome to the real world, sonny. Now get offa my lawn 'cause it's never as green as my neighbor's. ;-)
Seriously, though, different companies are just different. That's just the way it works. Some are seriously great. Some seriously suck. The rest are in-between.
Yes, it is normal. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been in corporate IT for over 10 years now.
The corporate standard version for Crystal Reports was so old, the version wasn't even listed on their website.
They were creating classic ASP (not .Net) applications as recently as 2005.
The most recently approved version of Visual Studio is... 2005.
There are still active VB6 programmers in the company.
Most of my department uses VSS 5 (yes 5, not 6).
The main corporate Java web app servers were Java 1.4 until last year.
On the other hand, if you come work for my sub-group, we've recently decided to screw corporate standards. We use mercurial, continuous integration with Hudson, Glassfish, latest version of Eclipse IDE, Java 6 and jQuery. None of this is corporate "approved", but we get high marks from our users! ;-)
Re:No CI? No version control? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure it is, and that's the route I usually take, but it's ten times more effort than you first anticipate. Even if you don't need to buy any new hardware, you still meet tons of resistance from people who refuse to change their habits.
Just a few years ago, I went through that hell convincing my employer to start using virtual machines instead of 10-year old PCs in the server room. He suffered from extreme sticker shock, would rather buy used stuff on eBay than spend a couple thousand on a white-box 2U server. Those things would fail every other week, they were awfully slow, and I wasn't too fond of driving out to the datacenter all the time to reboot a box or replace an (IDE) hard drive. It was like playing whack-a-mole with hardware failures. It took about a year to convince the boss to toss all that junk out and replace it with a big SAN and a few VM hosts. Just the time saved by not having to support crappy old hardware has more than covered the cost of upgrading to proper enterprise gear.
He finally saw the light, but it took a lot of nagging and teasing to open his eyes. Changing a company's dangerous or stupid ways is 10% technical know-how, and 90% psychology. You need to convince people their work will be faster/easier/better after the change, which often requires something to blow up in their faces before they'll even hear you out. Swoop in, save the day, and suddenly everyone's opening up their ears and budgets for your great ideas.