Best Practices - Global or Local?

I came across "Debating the merits of pair programming" this week, and found it irritating. Lest anyone think I'm picking on a particular piece or author, it's just the latest irritant in a series. You could conclude that I was a just a grumpy old man, or that it was very early in the morning and I hadn't gotten my 'day face' on (and there'd be an element of truth to both these thoughts), but let me try to explain myself.

The article presents quotes both supporting and opposing the practice of pair programming, based on personal experience, and some academic work along with critiques o that work. Implicit is that we should be able to somehow look at both sides of the argument and decide which is right and which is wrong. This is the process that someone might be going through if they were trying to decide if pair programming (and by the way, I think it should be called 'pair development', but that's another story) was an industry best practice (you should be able to hear the fanfare in the background).

I have a problem with the idea of industry best practice, and as a corollary with arguments about whether something is industry best practice or not. Fundamentally, it's a problem of context. When we hear about a best practice, what we're usually hearing is someone saying "that worked in my context", where the context may include the developers, the technology, the customers and a plethora of other things. And I love to hear about what worked (or didn't work) in your context - it's the first step to deciding if that might work for me too. The second step is to understand the similiarities and differences between our contexts.

There's another problem with the presentation of the arguments about best practices, especially when there's a bun fight between the relativists and the absolutists. Absolutists are the people looking for industry best practice - one practice to rule them all, one practice to bind them. Relativists are the folks saying "this works sometimes - it worked for me", or "sometimes this doesn't work". When I talk about pairing, or agile development in general, I try to be a relativist. I can say that it has worked for me. I can try to describe the context in which it worked, how it might work in different contexts, and how it might fail in some contexts. Then I come up against an absolutist saying "Pairing doesn't work", "agile development doesn't work". Come on dude, I just told you that I have a proof by existence - it worked for me! Most times I walk away feeling like I've just been called, indirectly and implicitly, a liar. And sometimes I get a bit heated when I feel like that :-)

So here's my proposal. How about we stop looking for industry best practices, and put some more energy into looking at practices which some of us have seen work and figuring out what contexts encourage or discourage these practices. I'm game, how about you?

PS. Apologies for turning off comments in recent posts - I'm using a new tool and I missed setting an option properly.