Best Practices (NOT!)

I've been a lazy boy with updating the English version of my blog. I'll whip myself into blogging frenzy and update the blog as often as possible. My first addition to my posting is my most frequent blogging on my Finnish blog.

For some reason I stumbled upon the JMB blog about maturity models and the critisism thereof. Within the posting there was a link about No Best Practices.

Our company has recently began its Quality Assurance project which is designed to raise the quality of all aspects of the company, from management and sales to code development and support. The thought struck me that "hey! We could improve the quality of testing as we increase the overall quality" and thus I started to think improvements through the company as a whole. The testing organization within the company should be revised and to make it more coherent and more effective. After a little brainstorming I ended up refining testing process, clarifying roles, increasing the testing skills and increasing the visibility of testing as a craft within the company.

Thus became the idea about testing architect and testing steering group. (Yeah, we aint that far in testing yet...) We already have a plethora of steering group and their main goal is for

sharing best practices, tools, frameworks and code.

Yay! Fun fun! Best practices! When all developers go by the best practices things can't go wrong, can they? Can they? Will they?

I myself strive towards continuous improvement in testing. Everything should be better than one done before. Besides I'm a bit of a context-driven test enthusiast and I like to hear what ye olde JMB has to say about stuff. (No offence, Michael Bolton!) Every single pratice, method and technique is attached into relevant context and time. With both of these being variable is it possible to say that a practice is best? Is there a practice that is better that the Best? If so can it really be said that a pracitice is best?

Could it be so that men (and women also) tend to veer towards practices that are already developed in some context and in their laziness or schedule pressure take these practices as graneted? Some people may use a certain method in his or her work and ignore more effective, more reasonable models and practices. Some people base their work on ".Net Best Practises" and nothing else and make that kinda code all their life.

Then there are people who innovate; break habits, patterns, prejudice; and challenge authorities! These "better practicists" and the force that drive every industry forward: they don't linger inte the artificial Best Practices but push through and take their work into another level. The others may imitate them and claim their practices as BEST. Just then the innovator carries on his or her work and strives for higher and higher.

Which one you are: Best practice person of Better practisist?