Dave Orchard's Blog

One of my favorite jokes is the "Numbered" jokes joke. One version is at http://use.perl.org/~petdance/journal/12313.

One of my work colleagues and I were talking about improving the efficiency of the standards process, and we thought that we could do this by numbering reasons and counter-reasons. We were quite amused by the idea of a standards meeting going something like:
person A: "17"
person B: "23"
person A: "98"
etc..

Here's a first cut at some of the canonical standards arguments, and I list them in the "point/counterpoint" style.

1. My customers are demanding this/aren't demanding this.
2. It's too complicated/not powerful enough
3. This doesn't/does hit the 80/20 point.
4. Real world experience says to do this.
5. This is/isn't in the requirements
6. This is/isn't in the charter
7. We have to ship this no matter the schedule/we are out of time.
8. I can't figure out how to test conformance on this.
9. This should be factored out
10. This is a second syntax or shorthand and that's always bad.
11. This optimizes for the wrong cases.
12. This is too researchy.
13. This isn't factored correctly
14. This doesn't compose with other things.
15. We can't wait for them to do the thing we need/have to wait for them
16. The architecture isn't clear
17. This doesn't conform to "the architecture".
18. I can't sell this to my customers
19. I can't sell this to my devs.
20. I can't sell this to my boss/mgmt..
21. This doesn't pass the giggle test.

Now I think these arguments are important resources, so I've marked each of the items with a name attribute with the number of the argument. So you could create a URI that looks like http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/2004/01/29/Numbered%20Standards%20Arguments#21.

I'll keep updating the list and see where this goes. It's certainly one of the geekier things I've written up :-)