I've found some things that I simply refuse to work without.
- Public, Centralized requirements visible to all parties involved. I is ridiculous that we still don't have such repository of information available, there is not a sane way to assign an identifier to the requirements. Then we go with the 'it is all on Microsoft Office documents' hell which are not kept up to date and which prompts my next entry.
- Version control. When we arrived here quite a lot of groups were working on windows shared folders... now it is a combination of tools but heck at least there is now version control.
- Controlled environments and infrastructure. Boy... did I tell you that we are using APIs and tools that are out of support?
- Continuous deployment. First time here, to assemble a deliverable artifact took 1-2 human days... when it should have been 20 minutes of machine time. And it took 1 week to install said artifact on a previously working environment.
And some other things that I will surely try to abuse until they are stamped on everyone's genetic code
- Automated Configuration Management. Tired of using excel/word for reporting which artifacts are released on every baseline.
- Automated acceptance tests. Testers that do manual testing, every time... are not testers... are just layer 8 automatons.
- Automated diagnostics. My app does not work....times every layer, dependency and configuration option available...
- Automated failure reporting. This thing went offline and nobody cared....