[1] The term is considered American business jargon,[2] but it is also encountered in engineering office culture.
In the High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) the process to define Ada generated requirements documents sporting different names, representing the various stages of development of the Ada language,[4] as described in 1993 by Col William Whitaker in an article ACM SIGPLAN Notices.
Edge, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Washington, DC 20307, Thomas A. Marciniak, M.D., National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD 20205 [12] 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.
It might be that the decision is to not continue at all, in which case, the ‘Straw Man’ approach may have saved a lot of wasted work in the long run.