I can and I did and I broke it because it turns out that the code is a total mess and it relies on random DLL’s being present in the build folder and won’t build from clean.

Thanks @wack I’m waiting to be involved in discussions with new work and hoping to be able to get some refactoring work in with the new work.

@ihatecomputers thanks for your good advice again, really much appreciated. I pushed them in my meeting on Friday to something more concrete than just “in the future” and asked if that when they delivered the roadmap any consideration had been given to paying down the technical debt. I will reiterate the same words on Monday, try to remain calm and objective as I think I’ve let passion/emotions get the better of me when I was blindsided with the stay or go ultimatum.

I need to give it more time, I feel about 6 months feels a good time frame and if I’ve seen nothing concrete in terms of change then it’s time to re-evaluate.

Thanks again, really appreciated.

@duckwit Thanks for responding and I entirely agree with you. I was lucky to have worked in a great organisation prior to this one that was genuinely forward thinking, gave developers space to improve the code, learn etc. Sadly the U.K. government reduced their funding and a round of redundancies started to happen, I jumped before being pushed.

I think for now I need to get through the first six months, tone down the rhetoric but quietly start to slowly improve the code base. I was never advocating a full re-write as there would be no love for that but more just a commitment from the team to making improvements. At the moment it looks to me that management are dictating arbitrary deadlines that are often unrealistic with little or no discussion with the development team. I need my manager to fight our corner a little bit to give us the space we need to make those small improvements.

@ihatecomputers In relation to the post above, one of the reasons the dev team have raised the flow it that they want to be able to commit changes, have the code built and then be able to preview that build without affecting others. I'd normally just say that they finish a feature, commit to a dev branch and then review the results. I think this stems from the fact they have 0 automated tests, that they want to push to an environment they control to see that it works after a build.

Not sure on what alternatives I could offer them, I suppose we could do direct builds from a feature branch which then deploy out to:

http://mywebsite/mybranch/

I'm used to a much more trunk based development work flow with feature flags to enable and disable code.

@ihatecomputers Thanks for the advice, yer that's pretty much my angle, I'm a pretty opinionated person about what I believe to be good practices and have become a little pushy, if they don't listen then I will walk. I've had the fortune to work for a great software company who were good at what they do but sadly had started announcing redundancies (public sector cuts) so I jumped. I was hired as a senior dev with the view they wanted to change but I think the development team doesn't have a voice and it is being driven by management, in the wrong direction, it's growth at the expense of quality.

I won't back down so easily!

I'm up for trying to drive change but I'm starting to hear from the dev team that management have suppressed them, so I may soon find out I'm powerless to do so despite them bringing me on under the premise they wanted to change!