Bravo! claps An exceedingly well written response with a superb analogy.
I'll just chip in that it's the same for pretty much all advice about how to do stuff... Another example is project management "best practices". The truth is, no practice is "best", they're only appropriate in certain conditions, and you have to use your brains to figure out which ones apply to your project at this particular stage.
The same is true for testing practices - you have to adapt to the situation.
Etc... Advice is like design patterns. You can't, and shouldn't, try to use them all at the same time.
This is absolutely right: Strategies are situational as well as species-dependent. There are times when the ant colony's strategy breaks down, such as when it invades my back porch and I call the exterminator.
As humans our overriding goal is to use our big brains to switch strategies when needed -- but not to switch too often lest we go insane trying to follow all the good advice on the Internet at once. Nobody said it was easy.
I'll just chip in that it's the same for pretty much all advice about how to do stuff... Another example is project management "best practices". The truth is, no practice is "best", they're only appropriate in certain conditions, and you have to use your brains to figure out which ones apply to your project at this particular stage.
The same is true for testing practices - you have to adapt to the situation.
Etc... Advice is like design patterns. You can't, and shouldn't, try to use them all at the same time.