Mark Jones has an excellent post on best practices for SharePoint development on his blog, entitled "Sharepoint 2007 - Development and Engineering Practices".
He places a great deal of emphasis on team development using Visual Studio and some sort of source control. He further recommends that as much as possible is automated via scripts or code to ensure that you can minimize the deployment effort, avoid errors, and manage code changes and versioning.
He's also a fan of test harnesses and not relying on SharePoint's object model to do all the testing for you.
One of my favourite tips is his advice to customize as a last resort. Although the SDKs and tools are getting better, there's a lot that can be done by configuring what's already out-of-the-box long before any code needs to be touched. Office 14 is already underway and while I'm sure Microsoft will try to minimize the changes, it's a sure bet that enough will change between versions to make upgrading a roll-your-own portal painful. In fact it's amazing how much can be achieved with just a little thought about the existing features.
Mark's got a lot of great conclusions and ideas in there. I encourage you to check it out.
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SharePoint is composed of multi-purpose set of internet technologies which might be beneficial for many organizations. Additionally, the technologies are backed by a typical technical infrastructure.
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