I was having a talk today with some colleagues about the scarcity of web developers, and even software engineers, who use best practices such as:
- using version control
- using a bug tracker
- writing unit tests
- using a programming framework
In all honesty, I didn’t do any of these before my current job at Govnex (aside from a little dabbling with CakePHP), nobody at my first 2 web development jobs did any of these, and we didn’t learn about any of this stuff in college. As far as I know, nobody I knew at RIT followed these practices except for maybe using a framework. Of all the job descriptions I’ve read in the past few years, only a handful mentioned using a framework, and only a couple mentioned anything about unit tests or version control; none of them mentioned the use of bug tracking software. One of my colleagues said that these practices are common among all developers, while my other colleague agreed with me that they’re hard to find.
What do you think? I’ve created a 6 question Google Apps form for collecting survey data and made the results public, it would be a big help if you could fill it out. Afterwards, please share your comments below.
Seán Hayes 