A very popular term within the business community is "best practice". It's a wonderful marketing term, how could someone possibly argue about adopting a best practice, but does the concept really make sense? I'm not so sure. There are many examples where a practice that is considered "best" in one context is questionable within another. As professionals, it seems to me that we should strive to understand the context which we find ourselves in, and then apply the practice which is best within that context. In other words, we should really be focused on "contextual practices", not "best practices".
When you observe what's going on within the agile community it becomes clear that many "best practices" really aren't. For example, consider the following practices:
The Situation Context Framework (SCF) helps to provide insight into the context which IT teams find themselves in. It describes several factors which provides this context. The factors are:
The point is that different teams find themselves in different situations, different contexts if you will, and therefore will tailor their approach to reflect that situation. They will adopt practices which meets their needs and tailor those practices accordingly, particularly when provided with the process goals-based strategy implemented via tool kits such as Disciplined Agile (DA) .