Earlier quoted context omitted.
"even NASA" implies that NASA is the objective paragon of software development. There are many ways to develop software, and while I have never worked for NASA I can virtually guarantee that their development process is not the same as some random web service. I've found that it's better to think of unit tests as a contract. You don't write them to check your code for bugs, you write them to declare an explicit (thou…
>> "even NASA" implies that NASA is the objective paragon of software development. Sure. They have some of the highest costs of failure post-deployment of anyone, and they have some solid development practices. I'll cite NASA in this context any time. Feel free to pull in other sources if you don't like them though.
But the constraints, requirements, and priorities for a given project at NASA won't even be the same as every other project there, let alone projects at pretty companies in different fields.
By extension, I would argue that the concept of universally superior development best practices as a whole doesn't make sense.