Infrastructure Debt Harder to "Pay Off" Than Technical Debt

Regarding point number one, let me tell you that I wouldn't work in a company that would force me to use inferior tools (e.g. Eclipse).

As a lumberjack, please don't ask me to replace my chainsaw with an axe.

Also, regarding code out of sync, it's because developers think differently. If you want code to look like it was written by one developer, try pair programming and pride management. You can't solve a social problem with tools, you can only deepen it.

As for virtual machines, please do so if you have a huge amount of money to throw out the window. A friend of a friend worked for a big company that had this policy. Because it took tens of minutes to compile the project and everything else was so terribly slow, I estimate this friend did actual work for half an hour or less a day.

The advice at point 1 is (or should be) the horror of any developer.

Mandating an IDE is a good way to limit your upside potential in terms of developers. Obviously, everyone on the same project should be using the same source control and the same code formatter/formatting either through the IDE or elsewhere before code is actually submitted to source control.

I'd be more concerned about technical debt as poor quality design and implementation (bad code or inconsistent with existing design) than automating deployment. If there are deployment consistency problems, then there is probably a more fundamental problem, like not automating distribution/packaging, or lack of functional testing, or not knowing which parts of the system are affected by the changes (incomplete deployment). The production deployment itself should be relatively trivial (or at least clearly/simply documented in step order).

I'm always interested to hear from/about developers for whom use of their preferred IDE is utterly non-negotiable. We're forced to be flexible about so many other technology choices--an existing app's framework, a corporate-dictated database, a deployment OS--that it seems arbitrary to be inflexible on the IDE question.

Excellent article. Even if you are doing things right, it is very easy to slip back into old habits. Switching frameworks? It's too much time to make your CI environment work with the new stuff - we can do that later. Of course in the meantime everyone goes back to running tests and deploying by hand. We are just climbing back out of that hole.

Also, thanks for the notes about ways to handle virtual machines. They are now featuring very highly on my ToRead list.