Alive Creative Endeavours
Software engineering best practices are and important part of my work. And although I know some of the phrases and acronyms, like Agile, Scrum, MVC, OOD/OOP, for me that is not what best practices is about. The ideas for best practices came into existence because they address issues people struggled with in the past and as such the essence they represent is important.
However I believe that the environment in which development is done is just as important as the lessons of the past. In other words, I think that what the best practices are for a particular engineering team depends on what works for the team. Sure the procedures used should reflect the essence of the lessons of the past, but the form should also fit the team and not the other way around.
In the end, the bottom line is to get stuff done, producing code that is elegant. And elegant is my word for qualities like maintainable, modular and easy to change and extend. Of course the path to get there will resemble project phases such as requirement gathering and analysis, design, coding and testing. And likely in some sort of iterative fashion. And frankly I don't care what the acronym for those practices is. I just want to get the job done in the best way.