If you go to Amazon’s book store and search for the words “Best practices” you will get 117,336 hits. It seems that we are keen on finding best practices to every problem in life, specially in the world of software development.
As you probably have experienced when reading these books is that they never seem to fit into our problem domain, and this is because they often exhibit little respect for the individuality of the problem, they try to sell a one-size-fits-all solution. In software development best practices comes in many forms like frameworks, patterns, anti patterns, business models and so on. Best practices is not evil, just that they are often unchallenged, a lazy way to solve problems, and do seldom fit completely with the problem area.
If I told you that I could fix your relationship problems because I have compiled a book called “Relationship best practices”, would you be skeptical or be running to the bookstore? You probably would be skeptical since we know that we need to work hard in a relationship, there will be hardships and good times, but we also know that the problems is much more complicated than that. “My” relationship book may give some pointers or insights on how others have solved similar problems, but it is not a complete solution.
