In the past, many of the organizations and managers I’ve talked with have considered best practices as an “all or nothing” thing—a top down, big-science, consulting-driven engagement that takes forever and returns questionable results.

But I think that’s changed over the past few years. What we have now are organizations looking to develop practical best practices—specific tools, standards, and guidelines for specific areas of the application development or QA process. Organizations can implement limited best practices for specific sections of their development cycle or development process without having to worry about creating a complete soup-to-nuts development methodology and standardization.

The benefits of moving toward an application development process that includes even limited best practices include:

• Lowing costs, including on-going maintenance, update and testing costs (delivering applications on budget)
• Reducing time-to-deployment for future upgrades or modifications (on time development cycles)
• Improving accountability
• Improving consistency
• Isolating problems and speeding resolution
• Increasing quality
• Increasing developer productivity

In reality, even with important benefits like the ones listed above, implementing best practices is not a Level-1 priority for most organizations. Most simply have too many important issues and on-going requirements to deal with. But implementing limited-scope best practices or development standards or automated tools that can help standardize and codify optimal approaches are often an important part of addressing the wide variety of challenges facing IT organizations.

To get started, keep in mind that practical solutions are good—there’s no need to retool everything to enable best practices. Stepwise enhancements in creating best practices for application development are ideal starting point. Most organizations can start by looking for tactical steps that will take them toward an overall best practices strategy. For example, select a logical area, project, or development challenge to start with, make iterative improvements, and then consolidate and expand your best practices over time to cover broader issues and less common problems. There’s no need to turn the organization upside down to gain incremental and real improvements in your development process.

An important consideration when looking at implementing Best Practices in a limited way is to use the right tools. Newer development tools are enabling organizations to capture best practices in select domains easier than ever before.