Being agile is a means to an end; your goal is to develop better software more effectively, not to be able to wear a "We are Agile" badge. If you're considering adopting agile, you are probably doing do because your current approach isn't getting you where you need to be so it's worth giving the 'by the book' technique a shot before you try to adapt an agile method to your circumstances.

Best practices are the result of creative and hardworking professionals evaluating and communicating what works and what doesn’t. Getting the right best practice in place requires personality traits that focus on doing the right thing without regard for whether you invented the idea or perhaps learned it from someone else. Sorting through the available choices can be very difficult, and too often we focus on who came up with the idea instead of what the idea represents in terms of value. Coming up with best practices that are truly best requires that we reach deep inside our own personalities for the traits that help us excel in everything we do. This article is about how to put your personality to work for you in a creative and productive way.

A friend and fellow consultant has been known to react quite strongly to the phrase "best practice".  Anyone who is unlucky enough to have James within earshot when they utter that phrase is likely to receive a dressing down for using it. "There is no such thing as best practice!" he will inform them in his not-so gentle manner.  "There are only good practices that are appropriate under certain circumstances!"

“Expectations from IT just keep increasing every single day “– this is a point of view echoed by several CIOs across the organizations all over the globe. Newer developments in IT like Social Networking, Green IT, Virtualization, and Business analytics are changing the way businesses are run.