Best Practice and Software Testing

The phrase "Best Practice" seems to incense quite a few people, particularly in the testing world. As far as I can make out the difficulty is semantic. Everyone seems to agree that some practices are better than others and that there are a body of practices that are good. What gets their goat is the idea that a practice is best. Surely a generic practice can be improved upon so how can it be best?

To avoid this you could substitute the phrase "good" for "best" and then it would allow those with a tendency for fury to attain the calm needed to learn from the practices, which must surely be the most productuve reason for reading them. I came across a library of best practices the other day at IT Managers Inbox. The idea is that there is a library of webinars that teach senior IT managers how to improve productivity and quality.

There is a range of topics including Risk Management, Software Quality (which includes one on Measuring Software Quality and Customer Satisfaction), and of course Software testing. There was an interesting sounding one there:

5 Lessons in Performance Load and Reliability Testing

Performance, load, and reliability testing are big investments, so make that investment count by applying smart, proven techniques. These tests are hard to design, hard to run, and essential in today's complex IT environments. In this webinar by Rex Black you'll learn five key do's and don't of performance, load, and reliability testing, all based on Rex's 20 years of experience.