I understand your frustration with trying to do this "internally", but stay positive and keep with it. If you (and like minded supporters) keep talking about "

I understand your frustration with trying to do this "internally", but stay positive and keep with it. If you (and like minded supporters) keep talking about "best practices", your peers _will_ notice and _will_ start playing with them in their work. At our workplace, we have a monthly hour-long "Lunch and Learn" where we all meet to do three things: listen to someone share some interesting code they worked on that month (which helps to generate some enthusiasm and spread some knowledge around); talk together about a specific best-practice; collectively review some code with a focus on using that best-practice to improve the code. It is a very simple, low-cost, low-time-cost way to formalize the fact that you want everyone to pay attention to these things, and (in our case) has really stimulated a desire among the developers to improve their code practice. To implement this, put someone in charge (or take charge yourself :) and just start asking people to contribute. You will probably find there is a lot more interest in this than you think. Also, be sure to go easy on yourself and your peers as you try to change habits. If you look back at code you wrote, say, three years ago, you will probably say to yourself, "What was I thinking? I could write that so much better now." In the same way, three years from now you will be able to say, "What was I thinking? I could [test|commit|organize|pair-program|etc] that so much better now."