The problem is that the industry, as a whole, is still extremely young, and simply hasn't had the time to develop a standard set of good, let alone best, practices. Tools and processes are changing at a rapid rate, and it will simply take time for best practices to sort themselves out.
>"Best practices" for development of an iphone game may not be the same as for flight software for an orbital rocket or for an international banking backbone.
I disagree. There are a few things that should be common across all of these, like not storing passwords in plain text.
Re:Best Practices Exist For A Reason
by bunderbunder on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @06:14PM
(#3921486)
Or, for that matter, not designing programming languages such that they violate the principle of least surprise with reckless abandon.
Edit: to use an analogy, imagine if all vehicle development was treated with the same terminology. Whether you're building helicopters, spacecraft, mass produced commuter cars, RC toys, nuclear powered submarines, formula 1 race cars, or tunnel boring machines: all of it is just vehicle manufacturing right? Just as anyone would find it ridiculous to put forward advice that could possibly apply across all of those distinctly different disciplines we should view advice about software with the same skepticism.