BullshitStick

The Bullshit stick provides an amusing deterrent to the greatest affliction facing the software business today.

The bullshit stick is a short, stout stick to be pointed accusingly at people who make dubious claims.

The rules:

• You must posess and point the stick at the suspect, then say "bullshit" to make a "bullshit" claim.
• The recipient of the claim must provide evidence to back up his or her statement immediately or shut up.
• Failure to produce evidence means adding a successful challenge to the scoreboard against the bullshitter.
• If the recipient succeeds in demonstrating his or her claim, a "reverse bullshit" happens. This means that the challenger is a bullshitter, and therefore scores a point on the scoreboard.
• Points scored are tallied weekly to determine the team's biggest bullshitter.

Merely waving the stick in the general direction of a dubious conversation can result in an abrupt silence.

Placing the stick between two developers arguing about something can be enough of a disincentive to make them stop arguing.

The bullshit stick was invented by JonWhite.

TimJoyce? has actually asked whether you can score "anti-bullshit" points because you've gotten away with unchallenged bullshit. According to JonWhite the answer was "no - you just live in continual fear of being challenged". (This made OliBye laugh a lot, I thought FollowTheSun? fell into this category, I hope I've been proven wrong).

Examples

• Successful: Use of the phrase "thought leader" because of a failure to prove that it has any meaning.
• Unsuccessful: Claim that the tests at a pairing workstation hadn't failed after all - when they had.

Less aggressive variation - the "destruct-a-stick"

Invented by DanG/PhilT. When a developer or a technical pundit keeps making scathing, negative comments - pointing the stick and saying "destructive" means they have to make a positive contribution or shut up.