Better Best Practices

Posting Provided by Rick Robinson -
www.oyarsa.com


Here's an excellent article I recently read:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/better-best-practices

"Finally, the expert simply doesn't use best practices, because they don't use any practices at all! In fact the expert subverts best practices in order to get work done (or rather, subverts the policing processes that inevitably accompany best practices). Best practices are a necessary evil that must be lived with but should not be allowed to hold them back.

These last two levels, and especially the expert, can quickly come to resent practice-based initiatives, in exactly the same way that the competent person resents being given task-level detail. ("Put the red eight there, under the black nine, then you can free up that ace."). You aren't just back seat driving when you constrain an expert to rules, you are invalidating their hard-won instinct and intuition."