In what situations is static method a good practice?

Question

I have read the following discussions:

Should private helper methods be static if they can be static , and
Should all methods be static if their class has no mem

Answer 1

Another good scenario for static methods are implementations of the Factory pattern, where you are allowing for instances of a class to be constructed in a specific manner.

Consider the Calendar class, which has a set of static getInstance methods, each returning instances primed with the desired TimeZone and/or Locale or the default.