[Sigia-l] Exhibit A

[Jared M. Spool]

On Nov 25, 2006, at 2:06 AM, Ziya Oz wrote:

> I point this out not to bash MSFT (way too easy :-) but to  
> underline the
> hypocrisy and utter incompetence of an organization that sets "best
> practices" for the rest of the software industry.

Great post!

I've never been a fan of the idea of "Best Practices", though it's  
one of the things our clients clamor for constantly. The premise  
behind best practices is you copy what they did because it obviously  
worked so well.

But, most of the time, what they *actually* did was less important  
than the context in which they did it. And, unless you duplicate the  
context (which is usually impossible), the practice itself will not  
return the desired results.

I think we need to encourage teams to put more measures into place so  
they can tell what works and what doesn't for them, in their own  
context. Yet that plays into what you were saying the other day (with  
the Joel on Software piece about measuring performance -- I blogged  
about it here: http://tinyurl.com/y7uldw ). In my opinion, we need to  
do some serious research on what those measures should be.

Jared


Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
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