Summary

I hope the information in this chapter has motivated you to help become part of the solution of thinking more about "recommended practices" or "contextual practices." I've tried to ensure that each practice is complete, correct, and up-to-date when it was written. But over time, each of these practices will become more and more out-of-date. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to improve each practice as time goes on.

So don't take this as a recipe book. You should try to understand each of the recommended practices, recognize the context for which it is intended, and try your hardest to either improve it or to tailor it to your project or your context. You're doing yourself a disservice if you simply take these practices and employ pragmatic re-use.

I hope this chapter has either re-enforced your thoughts on the term "best practices", or opened your eyes slightly. "Best practices" are far from a panacea, and far from "best" in every context. We've seen several motivating factors about why we might want to "use recommended practices" and why we're sometimes forced to resort to "recommended practices" rather than figure it out. I hope the information in this chapter has motivated you to help become part of the solution of thinking more about "recommended practices" or "contextual practices." Finding and using recommended practices is just the first part of the puzzle. In order to use a practice properly, we need to evaluate the practice: we need to know the context for which it's intended as well as the context in which we'd like to use it. This can be a complex endeavor, but several criteria can help us evaluate applicability of a practice. Once we know our own context, the context in which we would like to apply a particular pattern, it is only then we can truly evaluate a practice and use it properly. After all, we don't want to use a practice to save time and avoid technical debt if, in fact, it increases our technical debt and reduces quality.

In the next chapter we'll begin looking at source control practices. We'll look at some terminology, source code control architectures, and source code control usage practices.