{"id":272,"date":"2015-02-28T22:25:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-28T22:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8000\/?p=272"},"modified":"2015-02-28T22:25:31","modified_gmt":"2015-02-28T22:25:31","slug":"bpgb-the-witch-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/2015\/02\/bpgb-the-witch-hunt\/","title":{"rendered":"BPGB: The Witch Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the next entry in the <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"\/programmer_musings\/series_of_posts\/best-practices-gone-bad\/\">Best Practices Gone Bad<\/a> series of posts, I have a topic I wish I had thought of.<\/p>\n<p>In issue 125 of Overload magazine (Feb 2015), Sergey Ignatchenko wrote an article entitled <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/accu.org\/index.php\/journals\/2066\">Best Practices vs Witch Hunts<\/a>. Sergey covers a somewhat different approach to how best practices go bad. He walks through a series of steps leading from identifying a practice that a few teams find useful, through declaration as a <em>best practice<\/em>, to an end point of applying the practice religiously without regard for whether it is appropriate.<\/p>\n<p>One thing I don&#8217;t think I have described well in my posts is the point that best practices are trade-offs, just like everything else we do in development. Since any best practice is really a rule of thumb that works in many, but not all circumstances, you can&#8217;t enforce a best practice without thought. Sergey does a good job of getting this concept across in his article.<\/p>\n<p>Many of the best practices gone bad that I&#8217;ve described (and more that I intend to) only become a problem when someone uses the practice in a place where it is not the best trade-off. Sergey covers how people can become zealots enforcing a best practice to the point that it becomes a <abbr title=\"Best Practice Gone Bad\">BPGB<\/abbr>. He also touches on the social aspects of this kind of failure. I definitely recommend the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the next entry in the Best Practices Gone Bad series of posts, I have a topic I wish I had thought of. In issue 125 of Overload magazine (Feb 2015), Sergey Ignatchenko wrote an article entitled Best Practices vs Witch Hunts. Sergey covers a somewhat different approach to how best practices go bad. He\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/2015\/02\/bpgb-the-witch-hunt\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[88],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}