There are only the practices you are using now.
And practices that are better than the ones you are using now.
{ 2008 02 02 }
Lean Software Engineering
Essays on the Continuous Delivery of High Quality Information Systems
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A Test Guy » Blog Archive » 2 process thoughts | 02-Feb-08 at 6:25 pm | Permalink
[...] Corey Ladas posted: [...]
There are no a priori best practices » Blog Archive | 02-Feb-08 at 7:34 pm | Permalink
[...] Corey Ladas: There are no a priori best practices. There are only the practices you are using now. And practices that are better than the ones you are using now. [...]
John Hunter | 07-Feb-08 at 6:29 pm | Permalink
Actually I think this forgets the practices that are worse than those you are using now. Those that don’t use a process improvement tool (like PDSA) often adopt a new practice before testing to determine if it really makes things better first. Changes that are not improvement outnumber those that are improvement - I believe.
Corey Ladas | 08-Feb-08 at 12:29 pm | Permalink
John,
That is a good point. I don’t think many aspire to worse practices, but we should be mindful that worse is a possible outcome of change. Perhaps that speaks to the value of having a useful set of metrics.
I’ve seen a good deal of complacency: “the way I do it is the best way, so why change?” And recently, this seems to be an especially common malady.
Eric Landes | 12-Feb-08 at 7:20 pm | Permalink
Corey, A great post. To be honest, I am hoping to impart this attitude to our team here. I believe that there are current best practices. But in my career, I’ve never been at the best, and stopped. Maybe that’s just my issue. But I do not believe we have scratched the surface in delivering software with high quality, quickly.
I’d love to see any examples you have in how you’ve got that attitude across to your teams.
Corporate Coder | 12-Feb-08 at 7:55 pm | Permalink
Lean Thinking in Software Engineering…
Interesting post over on the Lean Software Engineering blog, " There are no a priori best practices…
Jay Packlick | 28-Mar-08 at 11:35 am | Permalink
Corey,
The term I try to promote is ‘better practices’ Our processes should be in a constant state of improvement thus, there’s no such thing as ‘best’ - which implies the dead-end arrival at a process destination.
J.