Why do companies spend enormous efforts in vain searching for “Best Practices”? Development Best Practices, Deployment Best Practices, Best Design Practices, Language Best Practices and so on….

I really feel uncomfortable when people talk about Best Practices. A lot of times we get stuck up in coming up with “best practices” as if they were final or ultimate. The whole point about Agile is, software development approaches are not static or final, we keep evolving and emerging. If something by nature is dynamic, evolving and emerging how can we say this is best? IMHO “best practices” exist only for a given context at a point in time (seconds). As soon as the time is over or the context has changed its no longer best.

Personally I prefer calling it “Better Practices”. For Ex: This practice in this context is better than the one we were using before this and hopefully tomorrow there will be a slight variation or a different practice which would be better than the one we are using today. There is no best, its only better.