Compare Best Practices

Side-by-side comparison of two or more applicable practices, with a recommendation.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is standard in management consulting (McKinsey, BCG), engineering procurement, and policy evaluation — whenever multiple viable options exist and the stakes of the wrong choice are high. Benjamin Franklin's "moral algebra" (1772) is the earliest documented systematic pro/con framework; it has been in continuous use for 250 years precisely because it externalizes comparison and reduces cognitive bias. Impact: Hammond, Keeney & Raiffa (1998) document that unstructured option comparison is the most common source of decision errors — people pick the option they encountered first or the one most recently described, not the one best suited to their situation. Structured comparison with explicit dimensions reduces this anchoring bias and produces more defensible decisions. Why best: "I'll just pick one" fails under two conditions: when options are genuinely close (no dominant choice) and when context determines the winner (one is better for small teams, another for regulated industries). A side-by-side comparison makes context-dependence visible and forces a recommendation the user can accept or override — rather than leaving them to decide without the information they need.

Sources: Hammond, Keeney & Raiffa (1998) "Smart Choices"; Benjamin Franklin letter to Joseph Priestley (1772); Kahneman (2011) "Thinking, Fast and Slow" — anchoring bias

Steps

Step 1: Identify practices to compare

From user input ("compare X and Y", "which is better — X or Y?") or carried over from a multi-match result in suggest-best-practice.

Infer before asking: Before asking, try to identify practice names from the user's description — methodology names, approach descriptions, tool names, or framework mentions all count. Examples: 'debating TDD vs writing tests after' → infer test-driven-development vs post-implementation testing; 'OOP or functional for this service' → infer apply-oop-principles vs apply-functional-programming. Only ask if inference produces fewer than 2 candidates.