Why “Best Practices” can be dangerous

I’m afraid that this post will stir up a hornet’s nest. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that “best practices” can also be dangerous. On a high level, the term signifies that you have reached perfection and you can’t improve anymore. That is just hubris! Of course, you should always ask whether you can improve your practice. It is not without reason that the third pillar of DevOps is “continuous improvement.” When I read in the very insightful book “Software Engineering at Google” that “we need better best practices,” I almost keeled over. Grammatically, “best” is the peak of the mountain and you cannot go any higher. Makes no sense to me. That’s why I try to avoid this term altogether and use only the more modest term “good practices”.

So, let’s disseminate a “best practice" which is widely spread in software development circles. You often hear the phrase “we do not deploy on Fridays” or “we only deploy on certain days of the week” or “we might deploy at the end of a sprint, but we won’t if we think something is not done yet”. At first glance, this sounds like common sense. So why could this cautious behavior be dangerous? Well, if you are afraid to do a deployment, then you either don’t trust your deployment process or you do not trust the quality of your deliverable. Guess what? Your deployment process does not get better by avoiding its execution! It similar to your muscles: If you don’t use them, they get weaker, not stronger! I highly recommend the presentation “10+ deploys per day” by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond. You should strive to be able to to that! In the end, your system will be more stable and less bug ridden, like the research published in the book “Accelerate” by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. High performance correlated (not intuitive at first sight) with fewer defects!

You can read more in my book “DevOps Mindset in Software Development, From Apprentice to Journeyman”. Try to consciously unlearn the assumption that you can’t improve on best practices but always ask yourself what is adequate in your situation and also question from time to time if it can be improved.