nice article..
reminds me of my Manager at IBM duing the mid-90's - "meetings are good provided there are no chairs in the room"
;-)
Martin isn't actually one of the Gang of Four...
As the author of the paper, I definitely wouldn't describe any of the patterns as "best practice". One of the reasons why I named it "It's Not Just Standing Up" was to point out that even standing up was a practice that should be considered in context.
Martin Fowler is not one of the Gang Of Four :-)
How is Martin Fowler a GOF? He was not among the 4.
Maybe better call him the Refactoring/Analysis Patterns/other well known works dude.
I meesed up and confused Martin to be one of the authors. I tend to do that with him, he's done so much :)
Fixed.
Jason: I would still call some of them best practices, as they can be considered as best practices, rather than patterns which can be implemented the same in different contexts.
But that's the thing. They are patterns because they should *not* be implemented the same in different contexts. I don't like the phrase "best practice" because it implies practices that are "best" independant of context.