[estava]

Maybe you need to pick your battles. Your question reminded me of this video: John Maxwell The 5 Levels of Leadership https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPwXeg8ThWI

See also this oldie article: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

Sometimes people have good ideas that may be a little overkill for your project. Running a VM could help with creating test environments. Although there may be alternatives to that. So maybe they just want to test more. Maybe they are more QA types.

Try to understand where they are coming from and give them some guidance. :-)

Cheers.

[th3iedkid]

i once worked with a remote(with a 12+hour time-difference) team and i was the least experienced(both effectively and in the code base) in the team. It was hard for me to both learn and work in that constraint and both of us found it difficult to continue for a brief period.But then after a while we knew the intersection of my strengths with what the project needed.Until that phase , i would often digress on things , esp Unit-tests .I was often singled out for focus(in those tough times) but these eventually played out as good learning points for me in the long run as i mastered their system that way.The manager understood my strengths early on and today we both are happy we went that path.