When making the case for library usage within an application, what arguments lead to the greatest success? How have you successfully helped co-workers see the benefits of library usage?
Specifically in the context where:
1. The library is open source.
2. The library is for JavaScript, HTML, CSS.
3. A team of developers has a culture where they believe they have seen it all, think they can program it all, and are generally suspicious of things outside their comfort zone (what they understand and have skill in).
4. The development team has kludged together 10+ years of this infrastructure type of code.
5. This homegrown code is embedded in server-side code.
6. The team does not use a web-development IDE.
7. The target user audience is currently 99.9% IE 6.0.
You know, the best arguments I come up with for this are that no matter how good your team is, bugs are inevitable; with an open source library, somebody has already found the bugs and fixed them. That’s by far the most persuasive argument I’ve used in that precise sort of situation. No matter how self-confident your developers are, they have to admit that even they have bugs in their code occasionally, and using code that’s already been extensively tested and debugged removes much of that indeterminacy.