Title: I&#x27;m flying in a few days to a developing country to lead a team of software developers. They are struggling with a project and the deadline is close. I accepted this contract because I like the country, the CEO and want to push myself to a first experience software lead.<p>One reason to bring me in is to implement good software development practices to the team. They are seriously lacking on this aspect: no test, a single staging dev server (no local dev env), no doc, inconsistent function and variable naming, the list goes on.<p>On the cultural aspect, the team is certainly stressed and I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if a few members will be defiant about seeing a Westerner joining the team that late in the project. Depending on how the CEO will introduce me to the team, I&#x27;m either the boss, am respected by default or another team member with no authority <i>at all</i> and can&#x27;t rely on status to move things forward. Hierarchy is extremely important to this culture.<p>I can&#x27;t just impose things: I need to sell good practices to the team so it becomes the natural next step to implement them.<p>It&#x27;s going to be hard to implement a full software dev pipeline in such a small timeframe but I&#x27;d want them reach the point where:<p><pre><code>  - the project is shipped
  - they understand why naming is important
  - they modularize their code
  - they do stuff for a reason (no meaningless SO paste)
  - refactoring becomes a reflex
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My solutions for this:<p><pre><code>  - mandatory code reviews, especially my own code. It seems to me like a good way to show the team how you refactor code properly, will make me meet and talk closely to the devs and will, hopefully, inject a sense of collective code ownership.
  - making it very clear from the very beginning that *I* will be the one to make efforts to make myself understood: I know that some of them have a below average English level and are not comfortable to speak to foreigners
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How would you handle this situation ? What first steps would you take ?
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