Best Practices
This article makes some excellent points about "best practices". It actually proposes to be thoroughly agile about things: keep evaluating, improving what doesn't work, and amplifying what does. Keep your eyes firmly on the value you want to deliver. It has to be noted that it takes some experience to implement the "way out" the article mentions - if you're too inexperienced (as an individual, or as a team) to see right through cultish best practices, you may also be too inexperienced to see which best practices are genuine. It's best to talk, get involved, network, discuss. Openly. Use data as evidence, and make decisions based on evidence.
Back in my academic days, I had frequent encounters with Stefan Hanenberg, who set out to investigate some dearly held beliefs in software engineering, for instance "static typing makes software better maintainable". Here's the actual study.
Tags: work