People there are frightened of making a mistake, frightened of offending "the ear", and afraid to trust each other. Example: small group of developers discussed a laborious paper process that could be replaced by file compare, sounded like they have wanted this for a long time. I'm not a developer but I thought I'd bounce the idea off a developer from another team. Other developer quickly looked around to be sure we were alone, dropped voice to a whisper and said "You HAVE to be careful what you say! There are people who have been here a long time and don't want things to change." The good news is I see they are advertising for an internal auditor so maybe the cloak and dagger era of process improvement will end soon.
