Over the past 5 years, I've come to the conclusion that there is something missing in the first few years of training aspiring developers embrace when they feel the pull towards software development as a career.
Scrum and XP practices have been around for quite some time now, 10 years or more to be more precise than "quite some time now".
I believe it's time for those of us who are more or less .NETters to take a break, reflect and start looking to our SUNners across the aisle (or Oraclers). Almost every tool we use in the .NET world to assess code quality got its start with a "j" in its name or at least with the absence of an "n". This tells me that there are either more mature experienced developers who are writing or have written applications in Java from which I can learn. The alternative is that we in the Microsoft camp write flawless code and therefore do not need to lean on quality tools.
I can tell you that I personally don't write flawless code. I lean heavily on quality tools to tell me when I'm an idiot. The beauty of those tools is they typically report my idiocy only to me and not to the people who assign my bonus. Of course, when I'm a real idiot and don't ask my quality tools if I'm being one, they will also quickly report to everyone that Tim had a poor thought moment.
Many of us pour libations out to Uncle Bob and Steve McConnell while others are clueless who these guys are and why we should care about what they say.
Here's an interesting factoid. From McConnell's Code Complete 2 book, he states that "a study conducted by IBM indicated that for every hour spent doing code inspections, 33 hours of additional work was saved".
These guys have been around the block a few times. We as developers should understand that their experiences can become our experiences if we only take a moment and listen (or read).
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