Well, I not so long ago began to pursue such an upstream battle. I will say that had we implemented maven, a lot of problems would have fallen away relating to a very inexperienced team considering what we were trying to accomplish. Similar environment/architecture I think; WSAD, Websphere, web applications. As I approached people trying to build consensus, I found no one who really had the knowledge about maven to give me more than a shrug and a "sounds cool". As I approached the subject in meetings I found resistance, not very much related to maven. It was more vented hostilities of a group of people frustrated by the vicious cycle of defeatism corporate culture, which had fragmented the teams that needed to work together if they expected to produce. The real and honest responses to my lobbying for mavenizing our projects during our "team" meetings probably would have sound something like; "I have no idea what your talking about and probably never will, so I'm against it", "I don't like when you get more attention in meetings, I think I'll make a negative comment now", "Oh great this is going to be another something we have to learn", "This idea didn't come from my group, I so I'm going to shoot it down", "That's not how 'we' do things, why is this guy always trying to fix what's perfectly broken" "I can barely do my job, now and this guy wants to add something" "Sounds like this might do part of my job, how will I justify my position" ... (ok`lil cynical, but I don't think I'm too far off)
Basically, I realized that the group suffered much deeper issues than Mavenizing our projects, even though it would have automated many things, enforced (or an least reported on) coding consistency, saved lots of people time in wheel-reinventing (if they actually spent 2 seconds on project docs), alleviated build issues that we had based in lack of knowledge, improved communication that wasn't happening, and even saved money and improved quality, and productivity. The legitimate technical counter points were: 1) I hadn't try Mavenide in wsad 5.0x, so IDE integration was a question mark, 2) and we used some special preview technology for ejbql optimization that someone claimed meant builds had to be done from within the ide (I didn't follow up to see if the WAS5.x ant tasks would do it or not.) My experience from this case was the direction needed to come from the top down. Had an IBM type or Accenture type consultant said "What... your NOT using Maven" then I'm sure our management would have - rushed to find out what Maven is, and then set the directive so everyone at least needed to make some effort to learn more than the word "maven". Retrospectively, I probably would have started with trying to get the highest level managers on board by defining in dollars and cents why its important, then made sure part of their commitment was to get some bundled consulting & training from an outside party, preferably from someone close to the maven project (like a maven committer and not a consultant that was sourced by way of a fourth or fifth level vendor and billed through the first level vendor.) Sorry for the email's tone, but that was my experience so at least you can benchmark against your corp culture. In a Six Sigma sort of culture the above story would have a smashing success ending, but...alas no. My two line response would have been: - My opinion is that maven fits perfectly for corporate development with tons of advantages. - But, getting buy-in and dealing with your company culture are key to doing it successfully. Thanks, -TR --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
