I had a principal engineer who wouldn’t use the term “best practices”. Instead, he called them “proven practices.” I’ve adopted that term myself, because it is

I had a principal engineer who wouldn’t use the term “best practices”. Instead, he called them “proven practices.” I’ve adopted that term myself, because it is much more accurate- there is a body of knowledge on how to build software well, but it’s a tool kit not an instruction manual. There also really is software engineering that goes on- I work in an org that does extensive analysis, testing, and validation of firmware before it is rolled out. It’s a real thing. That being said, so is cranking out a CRUD web app with zero testing to make our PMs data collection tasks easier. It’s all on a continuum. The key trick for software “engineering” versus just development is knowing where in the continuum a given project needs to be and what tools are appropriate in that context.