Develop a tool to boost the productivity of a software engineering team and convince all members to adopt it. Software engineers (myself included) can be very resistant to changes (especially when it comes to their tooling) and an in-house tool with a single developer behind it didn't contribute to the ease of adoption, but it was adopted regardless. I guess that the tool was indeed very good, or maybe I'm a sweet talker :)
Note: the team was very specialized, so there really were no competing tools around for that specific task.
The team had to work with tens of different embedded devices with all kinds of weird compilers and flashing tools.
My tool would help with the context switching between projects, providing wrapper scripts and inline documentation. It was some sort of literate programming in bash :)
Note: the team was very specialized, so there really were no competing tools around for that specific task.