Some big companies have centralized development R&D. But sometimes, it’s simply not working.
Start making developers better at choosing instead of choosing for them
Don’t misunderstand me (especialy you my dear colleagues who read this) : we need some kind of normalization in a company with a lot of different quality level developers. But if you focus on technological solutions you’ll risk to miss the point and make yourself useless. Especially on tight budget.
Do Less :
- Trying to produce One-Size-Fits-All-In-One-Inegrated-Frameworks
- Hiring intrusive consultants for a short term study
- Producing Out-of-the-real-world POCs (Proofs of Concepts)
- Listening to all exterior vendors that claim to have the best One-Tool-To-Rule-Them-All
Instead Start :
- Gathering common needs from different projects already in production or in the making
- Emulate innovation by offering a kind of Entreprise Github
- Best : go open source and participate to the real world solutions
- Organize as many education events as possible. It’s harder but cheaper than buying soon deprecated solutions.
- Create an internal StackOverflow to promote help between product departments that never speak together.
- Promote User Groups for both external (open source) tools and internals
- Look for the best practice, not the average one. For example promote and teach TDD and Continuous Integration.
What matters is not an all in one solution that will deprecate in 2 years, what matters is making the other average developers of your company better.
It’s about education, not technology. It’s not about methodologies, it’s about state of mind.