3 ms·
When I was an SRE-SE I despised the term "best practices". Teams would come in telling me all about the new best practice with serverless, Kubernetes, secrets s
by kodah 6y ago
When I was an SRE-SE I despised the term "best practices". Teams would come in telling me all about the new best practice with serverless, Kubernetes, secrets storage, or whatever. It was almost always like someone took a magnificent full Lego set and snapped off a wall and was like, "Hey, try this, it was useful to us." If it's not a protocol or standard recognized by one of the IEEE, IETF, or ISO then it's a tutorial with a strong opinion. Nothing wrong about that, but just know you're often reading a strong opinion, not a standard.
"Best practices" almost always come out of some business or project explaining what tested best with their circumstances. That alone tells you everything you need to know. Invest in a testing process which exposes the most critical parts of your application/infrastructure, attempt to overwhelm or exploit them, and you'll find out what your best practices need to be real quick. Those best practices may work at other companies but not nearly as well as if they invested in their own testing processes that are as or more rigorous than yours.
- koirapoika 6y agoI agree. Lately, I try to refrain from using the term 'best practices' in favor of 'good practices', 'common practices' or even 'my practices' for several reasons: - True best practices mainly refer to standards, and this list is very slowly updated, unlike the number of false ones; - It's often used for marketing purposes, which works well, but doesn't always imply quality; - Since this spreads fast, we often have things at the places where they do not fit, but squeezed into, because it's the best, so we must have it; - Forms a wrong mindset to rely upon someone else's experience instead of learning and gaining own understanding. In the end, we have tons of inapplicable or controversial information to filter, which doesn't make things better, in my opinion. Sharing is great but we should do it responsibly. It's also a bit funny to watch how the best practices suddenly become the worst. Edit: formatting
- marcosdumay 6y agoStandards are for interoperability. If you try to get best practices out of them, you are set for a world of pain. But I do agree, the hype of the day isn't a best practice either. And just the term "best practice" without any qualifier or context is already a sign of incompetence.
- jbjbjbjb 6y agoIt’s a peeve of mine too. The phrase ‘best practice’ is thrown around far too often and it can be used as a way to shortcut objective analysis.
- vp8989 6y agoIt's candy for beginner/intermediates who want to sound like they know what they are talking about.
- Frost1x 6y agoIt works very well. I've seen all sorts of monstrosity code bases developed under the guise of "best practices" where the original developer or team jettisoned away and now a business doesn't know what to do with it. They often can't abandon it because it's critical to their work but they also can't go forward as is because of all sorts of issues they're encountering. Application maintainence is where empirical data tests designs, best practices, and new shiny. Unfortunately, those who create these messes never see anything but greenfields while they perpetuate poor cargo cult mentalities. The tech and terminology often dazzles less savvy businesses and they're happy until problems start to arise.
- 2rsf 6y agoThe Context Driven Testing community said it [1] #1) The value of any practice depends on its context. #2) There are good practices in context, but there are no best practices. [1] https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/what-is-context-driven-testing/ https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/what-is-context-driven-t...