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Other dev won't follow best practices, is this common? (self.programming)

submitted 1 year ago by threedragons_19 to c/[email protected]

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Hello again, I'm in a situation where the one the senior devs on my team just isn't following best practices we laid out in our internal documentation, nor the generally agreed best practices for react; his code works mind you, but as a a team working on a client piece I'm not super comfortable with something so fragile being passed to the client.

He also doesn't like unit testing and only includes minimal smoke tests, often times he writes his components in ways that will break existing unit tests (there is a caveat that one of the components which is breaking is super fragile; he also led the creation of that one.) But then leaves me to fix it during PR approval.

It's weird because I literally went through most of the same training in company with him on best practices and TDD, but he just seems to ignore it.

I'm not super comfortable approving his work, but its functional and I don't want to hold up sprints,but I'm keenly aware that it could make things really messy whenbwe leave and the client begins to handle it on their own.

What are y'alls thoughts on this, is this sort of thing common?

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[–] Windex007 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've seen this play out many times, but only once was it good. BUT ONCE I did see it be good. It was interesting enough that I took the mental notes of why it worked. Huge asterisk because there are still pitfalls around the team having a single point of failure, but that's an issue with many other modes with mixed skill.

Anyhow:

-The whole team was bought into it as a working mode

-There was a QA embedded directly into the team

-The bulldozer was forced, but willing, to routinely re-communicate plans and issues

-The bulldozer became good at proactively communicating "hotspots"

-The bulldozer was not allowed to do estimation, the surrounding team did that.

-The bulldozer agreed to be obligated to prioritize helping the team if they had questions (I think this is what helped him to be so proactive... He was incentivized to avoid this scenario of confusion entirely)

Anyways... I still don't recommend it. But, assuming people are into it, I think there are ways to arrange the right individuals into teams in a way that minimizes the major pitfalls. I'm a pretty big fan of letting/helping teams self-organize into whatever their efficiency maximum is.