Home | Login | Recent Changes | Search | All Pages | Help

SessionFour020

No Best Practices: How To Think About Methodology
JamesBach and MichaelBolton

There are no best practices. No person in one context can claim their practices are "best" for everyone in all contexts. Most practices we hear proposed as "best" are arguably not even best in their original context, and in some cases, may not even be practices, but just rumors of practice. The phrase "best practice" is part of an understandable wish that somebody somewhere knows the "one right way". But this wish cannot be fulfilled. Bestness, goodness, even usefulness, are not attributes of any practice, but lie instead in the relationship between practice and context.

We think a better approach is for you to become your own methodologist. Learn to think through contextual factors and consider the relative value of different practices. Invent or adapt practices to fit the context.

To investigate and illustrate this process, we will examine the role of repeatability in testing and how it is sometimes valuable and sometimes harmful. James and Michael will demonstrate a game they developed to practice context-driven thinking. The spirit of "best practices", we think, is that of continuously looking for problems and solving them. This can be a powerful idea, but the phrase itself undermines the idea. Let's dump the phrase and keep the spirit.

Objectives

• Make you unsatisfied with the phrase "best practices."
• Replace "best practices" with "good practices in context."
• Show you how you can practice context-driven methodology.
• Answer the question "Aren't you saying that avoiding the phrase 'best practice' is a best practice?"