Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Developers do what they see...

This is probably the first really big project that I have been on and I have learnt a lot. One of the key lessons I have learnt is that the average developer is a sheep. He (or she) will do what they see and very seldom will they go against that.

In fact, even if it's wrong, they will do what they see.

It is has been quite remarkable.

So changing habits is not easy, especially if you're on a complex enterprise project which has been going for 18 months with a very fast development cycle. There are _many_ different ways of doing almost anything in the code so the poor developer has no idea what approach to follow.

It also means that changing habits is not easy, is has thus been quite encouraging to see some habits changing - I introduced commons collections into the code base, used it in my code, and showed a few dev's what it offers - and I'm now finding it is used more and more.

The other good thing about the way developers do what they see is that if what they see is good and right, those habits are persisted. I guess the opposite also applies, if what they see is low quality, they will extend that low quality.


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