Peace for Pachyderms

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine showed me a book on software requirements. On the cover was a picture of an elephant split up into various parts. Various men were gathered around it.

A few weeks ago, a friend was telling me that he was having problems convincing his team to think about scalability early in the process.

"Nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room," he said.

Microsoft has it's own elephant for conference rooms, it seems, which it has humorlessly named "Apple". (See Microsoft’s elephant in the OS room: Apple)

Elephant 2000 is hailed as "good for writing and verifying programs that interact with people"

A recent commenter on Hacker News said "What the parent says is that a proper assessment will require an in-depth knowledge of how it is actually implemented. Taking random shots like this article does is like a blind man trying to grope an elephant."

Then just recently, I came across an article that was all about eating elephants as part of agile software development. "The best way is to cut it into small slices" the article recommended.

I would like to take this opportunity to call for a stop to the exploitation of elephants by the software community. The time has come for somebody to make a stand.

Blind men groping elephants? Allowing elephants to run wild in conference rooms? Discussing -- gads! -- the proper way to eat elephants?

This must stop. Sight-impaired persons should find other animals to grope. Elephants that run around in conference rooms should be talked about. Let them out to the savanna, where they can roam free with their brethren. Finally, this talk of elephant meals must come to a halt.

Stop the insanity! If nothing else, think of the children.

Sadly, elephant groping has become an epidemic in software circles
even among sighted programmers