Way back in junior high I had a good friend who was a huge fan of military aircraft.

His bedroom walls were covered with huge, hard to procure and often expensive posters of these deadly devices. His desk featured an actual (albeit non-functional) 20mm shell, of the variety used in the depleted-uranium spewing gatling gun.

His favourite military fighter jet happened to be the F-15 Eagle.

Feeling a little left out, I started pouring over his resources, carefully reading his encyclopedia's of fighter aircraft, absorbing all of their attributes. I decided that my favourite fighter jet was the F-14 Tomcat: Clearly its ability to land on carriers, its swing-wing engineering, and the long range phoenix missiles it supported, made it the superior aircraft.

There was no way the F-15 Eagle compared, I argued. The F-14 Tomcat was obviously the choice of those in the know. The enlightened ones, if you will.

Yet the reality -- and I think my friend Brian always knew it -- is that I chose the F-14 primarily because it wasn't the F-15. After picking a natural alternative, I started building layers and layers of justifications for my decision.

I see the same sort of thing fairly typically in software development: Big up front design versus agile designs; Getters/Setters versus fields; namespace naming guidelines of type A or type B; variable naming standards; stored procedure naming standards (or the religious "stored procedure versus dynamic SQL" argument that rages on in teams across the lands); the sorts of types to use for primary keys; the languages and platforms to choose; whether or not to use XML, and what to use it for.

So many times, it seems, people choose their positions based not on actual analysis and honest beliefs, but rather because they're countering someone else in their team -- especially when attempting to undermine authority, actual or perceived -- or they battling someone else in their organization (that dastardly team in Sector G that's trying to get kudos by setting the development guidelines!), or they're deriding someone in the industry.

Often They're just trying to be different and difficult, and the beauty of software development is that there are many, many right ways to do it, and it's easy to find allies in discussion groups to assure one that everyone else is idiots, and their new position is the One True Way.

It's easy to appeal to authority, given that there's some big name or organization that, in some form, promotes just about every software development practice and standard imaginable (Microsoft is a particularly good example of this, as throughout the organization they follow so many standards and practices, that one can easily find an example conforming with their dogma, using it as an example that it's the "Microsoft way",  ignoring the many exceptions).

Of course all of this doesn't preclude disagreement on standards and processes and techniques -- people often truly disagree because they legitimately and rationally believe something different. In a full of intelligent, self-directed professionals, such disparate beliefs and conclusions can be enormously beneficial. The problem is when interpersonal issues materialize as technical disagreements.