Straw man proposal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A "straw-man proposal" is a simple draft proposal intended to generate discussion of its disadvantages and to provoke the generation of new and better proposals. 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, etc.
The succession of names comes from the requirements document for the programming language Ada. In this document, the various stages were Strawman, Woodman, Tinman and Ironman. Later, another Ada document added the following sequence of men: Sandman, Pebbleman and Stoneman.
Another commonly-used term for this kind of brainstorming document is an Aunt Sally.
