Introducing a new way to do something to a team that is already comfortable and setup doing something a particular way is never an easy task.  This a challenge I set myself when I started a new job six months ago.  The team I joined were not practicers of Agile.  They had their own method, and they were comfortable doing it that way. 

I had just left a job that was a full-on 100% Agile/XP team.  It was in that job that I learned to appreciate how things such as TDD, Continuous Integration, Pair Programming etc could make my job simpler and more enjoyable.   When I started my new role, I observed that practices such as these could help my new team improve.

I first introduced Automated Testing and Test Driven Development and overtime I built a Continuous Integration server (using CruiseControl.net).  I talked with my team leader about having morning Stand-Up meetings and keeping track of our requirements as Customer Stories.  He was very supportive in the adoption of these practices as he too had been exposed to these ideas and how useful they could be.

At first I was basically the only person in the team that practiced any of the above techniques, or took notice of the broken builds in the CI server.  The other team members continued developing as they had always done, and there was no way I was going to march into a new team and start telling them what to do.  I figured the best approach to showing the team the value of these practices was to lead by example.  Every day I would write my unit tests, update the build scripts, encourage our team to have a morning stand up meeting and so on.  After a few months a few of the other team members took an interest in what I was doing and started asking questions - which lead to them slowly adopting the Agile methods. 

It has now been six months and now team members are starting to write unit tests, people are becoming more interested in TDD and refactoring, and every person receives broken build alerts and actually acts upon them.  In the big scheme of things, and for people that are working in a very experienced and well developed Agile team, this progress may seem so insignificant. But for me it is huge, and this is just the start.  There is still a long way to go, and I'll continue taking it one step at a time.

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