I'm in the middle of reading "Succeeding with Agile" right now. In chapter 2, Mike Cohn offers a dire warning against establishing "best practices" of any kind:
"When transitioning to Scrum... collecting best practices is dangerous. Like sirens singing to us from the rocks, best practices tempt us to relax and stop the effort of continuous improvement that is essential to Scrum... Although team members should always look to share with one another their newly discovered good ways of working, they should resist the urge to codify them into a set of best practices..."
He goes on to quote Taiichi Ohno, of Toyota:
"...there is something called standard work, but standards should be changed constantly. Instead, if you think of the standard as the 'best you can do', it's all over... [if we establish something as] the best possible way, the motivation for kaizen [continuous incremental improvement] will be gone."
Attribution: Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum, Mike Cohn, 2010
