[ruby-talk:10627] Re: How to convince management

[e-mail] (Phil Tomson) writes:

> Managment is understandably suspicious of using Ruby - they've never heard 
> of it before and they don't know if it is stable.  They say there is no 
> in-house Ruby expertise (actually only myself and one other programmer 
> would be working on the system and I don't think it would be difficult to 
> transition from Perl to Ruby for either of us).
> 
> Has anyone else out there faced a similar situation and succeeded in 
> convincing management?  Does anyone out there have success stories about 
> using Ruby for fairly largescale projects that I can show to my 
> management?

Firstly, your management is right to be wary of using something
they've never heard of. From their perspective, using Ruby would be a
risk.

But, you could turn that around. In the business world, you take risks
when there are commensurate rewards. In this case, you might want to
show them the benefits on using Ruby in this situation, and explain
how taking this step will give them a more maintainable application in
less time. Perhaps you might want to illustrate this: spend an hour of
your own time putting together a dRB application where one machine
interacts with dRB objects on a number of other machines. Then show
them the code, and tell them how easy it was. Finally suggest that if
they want to kick the tires of this new technology, an internal
project would be a good place to start.

I know of one company here in Dallas that is using Ruby as the
scripting interface to a very complex telecom testing system. This is
a large-scale commercial product which will be shipping shortly, and
in some ways it revolves around Ruby. Andy and I have been delivering
Ruby software to clients now for over a year.


Good luck!


Dave