The rocky road to introducing new software tools in existing teams or how to teach your colleagues to do better.

Software plays a prominent role in today’s research landscape. Whether it is the specially developed simulation code, the collection of Python scripts for statistical analyses or simply the good old Excel sheet.
Modern research would not be possible without software in most cases. Experience shows that at the same time many areas of the otherwise progressive research community still show a strong resistance towards
the introduction of new software tools and workflows. This can lead to many different disadvantages for the scientific process of the corresponding research group, which does not adapt to the current software-technical developments.
Unfortunately, the disadvantages of this are often overlooked or ignored.

In this very subjective contribution, we try to work out some of the reasons for this behaviour and propose strategies for changing it within existing research teams. In doing so, we show some positive and negative examples that we have encountered during our own work.