What is evil in our profession is that everyone professes some technique or another that has worked for them, without mentioning any specifics about the exact s

What is evil in our profession is that everyone professes some technique or another that has worked for them, without mentioning any specifics about the exact situation in which that technique worked. Infact most programers go out of their ways to avoid mentioning specific experiences, confident that their grand designs generalize across all projects, platforms and languages. Just look up the recent TDD debate with Bob Martin and DHH and see if anyone mentioned one specific project / example. As a result we end up with long diatribes of barely useful "best practice" advice that is spread by means of cargo-culting and that causes problems down the line. What we need to collectively do is get off our high horses and start talking about specific projects, situations and problems. Start asking ourselves: Why did our solution work? What was the specific problem and situation? Which properties of the problem made our solution the right one?