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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Tue, 30 Aug 2005

No such things as Best Practices, part two

In Ted's second post he didn't quite get my point, but I've re-read my earlier posts and it's probably my fault. I don't think I stated it very clearly.

"Best Practices" is ~not~ a term that originated with the software industry. We borrowed it.

Hit this Google link to see how many hits "best practices" -software gives you. I'm seeing 20,400,000. The first hit is about manufacturing best practices. The second is a company who walks companies through implementing best practices in general business environments.

I mentioned the previous posting to my wife and her first comment was "It's not a software term. It's a common term. They'll just confuse people".

Well, right.

Yes, the term has been abused. By if we choose to ditch the term and go with "useful practice", we've put yet another barrier (YAB?) between ourselves and our customers. We've introduced another term they don't know. We've done just a little bit more to mystify the priesthood of the programmer. We're using one more bit of jargon... don't we have enough jargon already? When your customer asks about best practices, will you tell him you don't use the word anymore or are we suggesting a secret society set of terms that we use when we are among the more enlightened people?

I firmly believe we should demystify our work, our processes, and our problems. One part of that is using terms our customers understand. And if a few luddites misuse the terms along the way, so be it.

Jared

posted at: 20:52 | path: | permanent link to this entry