Planning Smarter: Creating Blueprint-Quality Software Specifications

6.1. Best Practices

Although not really a model of software development, the term best practices is often used in the same breath. It is commonly used as an umbrella term to encompass whatever the companies who are doing things well are doing. Those who use the term don't always have a very precise idea what those “best practices” actually include. Lots of people use it to describe whatever ad hoc processes their firm uses in a favorable light without having to really justify the description. “Of course, our firm follows all the industry best practices!”

If asked to itemize actual best practices, most planning experts would probably include the following:

• An iterative software process

• Requirements management

• Component-based architectures

• Software ...