Practice Selection

This book presents standards, techniques, and conventions that many professional .NET developers would agree are very good practices. People with different experiences or expertise might believe there are better practices. A ruthlessly helpful practice represents a point-of-view and an assertion that following the given practice is both sensible and beneficial. Common sense dictates that having a set of sound, helpful practices in place today is more useful than spending a lot of time researching and selecting the best practice. It is important to have an efficient way to select new and different practices that focus on improving outcomes.

In the book Rapid Development,¹ Steve McConnell provides a list of 27 best practices. In addition to that list, the book provides tables of many best practice candidates and a summary of best practice evaluations. This is a very comprehensive treatment of the topic of best practices. For commercial software development organizations looking to adopt best practices across the board this approach is a great way to organize the initiative. In Rapid Development, the evaluation of best practices includes five criteria: