> practices must be followed every time This is only good advice if you're solving very simple, very trivial problems, or if you don't have enough experience.

> practices must be followed every time This is only good advice if you're solving very simple, very trivial problems, or if you don't have enough experience. (That, or if you redefine best practices to tautologies like "always test" or "always write good code"). For anything more complicated than the most trivial of software, it's important to deeply understand your best practices and if they make sense to each situation or not. Software is hard. There are no silver bullets.