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Well, there is no guidebook for this kind of thing. I don't know what to tell you. THere are probably people who know how to accomplish what you are trying to do, but I don't know how to advise you past this point.

The takeaway is that while you sound like you are probably a solid developer who's passionate about good software dev practices, the thing you need to work on is people skills, and the politics on how to get what you want. Basically you have a set of things you want to see done from a tech perspective, but now you need to figure out how to effect that change in the company you're in. It's not as easy as it sounds. It's not as easy as explaining the benefits to people. A lot of times, to be honest, I've felt very passionate about something and when it came time to try to convince others, I couldn't really convince them and it was really frustrating. The only thing you can do in those cases is to learn to be less rigid about it. If it's going to bother so much that youa re going to keep stickling about it, you might better off working somewhere else.

I learned that I am sometimes very rigid in how I want things done, but that is only my idealized version of how thing should be. The rest of the team may not want to adopt my ideas, so I had to learn to accept that. There is the perfect way of doing things, an then there is how things are done in real life. Everyone has different motivations. Sometimes people just aren't into their software dev jobs, sometimes they just know software as they learned it years ago and don't want to learn to do things the "right" way, or don't want to learn new technologies. Sometimes the motivations are political. Sometimes it is possible. I think it's often impossible to effect change if the "rockstars" aren't in agreement, often as we discussed before, because they don't want the guys lower on the totem pole showing them up by improving things.

It sounds like you have reached a dead end. You can either figure out how to do it on your own, which will take soft skills. You won't do it by convincing anyone that your ideas are technically the right way to do things. People generally don't care about that in the real/business world. You will have to learn to influence people, to convince them to do things they aren't into. One of the ways I know of is to do the pocket of excellence and make the team dependent on your way of doing things, and then when they are dependent on it, expand, and formalize it. The CI server is running in a VM on your workstation. You just use it and set it up, and make sure everyone on the team can access it. When they want a build, you send them a link to the URL for your CruiseControl instance (o whatever CI tool). They want to fix a piece of code you are in charge of? If they code a bug, make a unit test and ask them to write code to make the test pass. Just set things up the way you want as much as possible an force people to use it. Don't give them a choice. If yuo try to have a discussion in which you envision people agreeing with your way of doing things, that will never work. Just force them to move in the right direction by doing it. Managers aren't as powerful as you might think. The team generally does what they want. The worst that could happen is they ask you to cease and desist, but they probably won't because they probably know that you are a good contributor and they will have to put up with your desire to do things "right".

That's it, basically is to keep trying, but don't try to argue verbally, just put stuff in place and don't give people a choice, or you can find other employment. Focus on small things, and 1-2 changes at a time, you don't want to change everything at once.

Hope this helps.