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.