Step 1:    Honestly appraise the benefits vs costs of a new platform or
language.

Step 2:    Present that appraisal to management with the proposition of fielding
a "pilot" as a hands-on evaluation.

Step 3:    Choose a non critical yet non-trivial application for your pilot;
something challenging, yet possible for neophytes; something *not* related to
your production systems so it will not cripple those systems if it cannot be
completed.

Step 4:    Give it an honest try and *document, document, document*, then flood
the decision makers with those [honest] wads of documentation.

Step 5:    Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.  In other words: be
ready to try again.

<BOL>


Dave Thomas wrote:

> ptkwt / shell1.aracnet.com (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