There's a huge difference between "we don't have tests and we don't see the value in automated testing", and "we don't have tests right now, but automated testi

There's a huge difference between "we don't have tests and we don't see the value in automated testing", and "we don't have tests right now, but automated testing and process improvements are something we're working on". I suspect you're talking about the latter, whereas OP is talking about the former. Culture is a lot harder to change than code. If the people already there don't see the value in process improvement, then attempting to introduce any sort of process improvement will be a Sisyphean task. You'll make progress only to see it get rolled back time and again by teammates who just don't believe in what you're doing. Take automated tests as an example. I have worked at a place where I committed automated tests and configured them to run before build. Then, I got a bug report for a module I had worked on and wrote a test suite for. The test suite should have caught the bug... had it not been disabled by another developer who'd committed the breaking change and, instead of investigating why the test failed, just dropped @ignore annotations until the tests passed again. That's the sort of thing that OP is warning against. Life isn't long enough to spend time bashing your head into walls like that.