I don't care if it looks like a bunch of spaghetti or really thin french fries, that's definitely straw. After some additional time to think, this probably deserved some sort of Wizard of Oz Scarecrow reference about lacking a brain, but that just seemed to be overkill. If you want to read additional layers of meaning into the comic, metaphorical, pedagogical, analogical, and so forth, please feel free. Whatever you come up with, I meant to include it as part of the whole experience. This comic is just the strawman for a comic with deeper meaning.
A straw-man proposal is a brainstormed simple draft proposal intended to generate discussion of its disadvantages and to provoke the generation of new and better proposals. The term is considered American business jargon, but it's also encountered in engineering office culture. Sometimes "straw dog" is used instead as form of political correctness.
Often, a straw man document will be prepared by one or two people prior to kicking off a larger project. In this way, the team can jump start their discussions with a document that is likely to contain many, but not all the key aspects to be discussed. As the document is revised, it may be given other edition names such as the more solid-sounding "stone-man", "iron-man", and so on.
In software development, a crude plan or document may serve as the strawman or starting point in the evolution of a project. The strawman is not expected to be the last word; it is refined until a final model or document is obtained that resolves all issues concerning the scope and nature of the project. In this context, a strawman can take the form of an outline, a set of charts, a presentation, or a paper. [Wikipedia]
The explanation at Wikipedia of how the DOD uses all sorts of ABCman variations and how that relates to Ada is a neat piece of trivia.
Snarky: Strawman
Title: This will in no way generate a better proposal.
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