Best practices!

There are often fun situations at work. Here, I will write about one (don’t expect to laugh loudly here, the situation is very subtle here) such that happened just two days back. I received a mail from one of the top guys in my organization two days back, who also takes care of the CMMI implementation at our company, enquiring with me about one of the software applications I developed to help smoothen the workflow in my team. I created this tool couple years back, but I digged up a bit and sent an immediate response to him. He too replied back immediately thanking me for my fast response, and assuring me that he will get in touch with me about this, soon. Additionally, he asked me something, which sounded quite funny to me…

He asked me, “Do you know of any best practices in your team in the last 6 months or so?”. My initial thoughts were guided by this article from James Bach. I believe, James’s thinking is right, but his thoughts are very radical. He totally defies the existence of any such thing as a ‘best practice’ in the software industry. I am not that rigid, but couldn’t nevertheless understand the definition of this term fully. The usage of this term is grossly relative and people often associate a sense of stylishness or being ‘state of the art’ with the software industry jargon. I don’t associate any more importance to this.

So, with all these thoughts in mind, I couldn’t help wondering what the sender of the mail meant by this term. To me, everything we do in the team seems good enough and can be called up to the mark of quality (again, quality is a relative term – but we won’t enter into another set of discussions on this now). So, can I term all of what we do in our team as a best practice? Essentially, my question is what is my benchmark for a best practice? Who defines it? As far there are no point answers to these questions, nobody can deny anything we do at work as being claimed as a best practice. Do you agree?