I’ve been talking about this before so there will be no surprise : I don’t like dogma-driven thinking in software development (people who know me personally know that it’s also true in politics or any other area).

Tonight I stumbled upon an initiative of Alistair Cockburn : The Oath of Non-Allegiance…and of course I’m in:

I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.

Now that I have taken oath, I must make a confession : I sometimes exclude from consideration ideas based on their source when the source appears to me as dogmatic. This is a mistake. Extremism is a plague for learning and anti-extremism is definitely an extremism. So let me add this appendix to my oath:

I will not exclude from consideration any idea coming from schools, dogmas and heritages based on the single fact that they come from a heritage, a dogma or a school.