It all started with this tweet from J.B. Rainsberger:

jbrains I consider never using the phrase "best practice" a best practice. #wcr09

I RT this, just like many other people.

I like to think I immediately understood what JB ment to say.
For me it what it means is that, from the moment people start to call something a Best Practice, it blocks them. And worse, it blocks other people.

What Best Practice really means is: this is the Best practice at this moment and under these circumstances.
How people use Best practice is: You have to do it like this, and don’t change anything. It is a proven technique, don’t change it, we know better then your situation.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Best practices, as long as they don’t limit me to work in a better way.

And then a few hours later, I realized that my slides for my AgileEE talk had ton’s of Best Practices slides.
Mmm, if I really don’t want my audience to take my idea’s and use what ever they want and adapt them, I should find a better word then BEST Practice.

It took me a few iterations of my slides. At this moment I ended up with great practices instead of BEST Practices.
So I’m actually proposing we stop using the word BEST practice and we start talking about great practices.

What do you think, it is a better idea then the use of BEST practice?