Some teams are orders of magnitude more effective than others. Kent Beck famously described himself as "not a great programmer, but a good programmer with great habits".
Patterns of Effective Delivery
If someone can't tell you where something doesn't apply, they don't understand it yet. Or they are selling you something.
Best Practices are for beginners. Patterns for advanced people.
A Spike is like an "option" in the financial world. It gives us a right, but not an obligation.
Test Driven Testing
Ginger Cake: Like chocolate cake just with ginger.
Copy-paste code to get start quickly. From code you know really well.
The dark side of DRY is coupling
Silos are bad, cross-functional teams are good. No, there is spectrum.
Small sub-teams with common stand-ups
Burn the Ships: Force your people to move forward by eliminating the way back.