About
A small company with a narrow purpose.
HyperAlliant is a Maryland public benefit company. Two people, one methodology, and a deliberate decision to give most of it away.
The company
Founded as a retirement project.
Not a startup. Nobody here is trying to build something to sell.
HyperAlliant was founded by retired technology executives who spent their careers watching enterprise software fail the same way for the same reasons. The company is small on purpose and structured as a benefit company on purpose: the charter is the constraint that keeps the free side from being quietly cut when it becomes inconvenient.
Our mission is to be a trusted, non-partisan source of technology education and training that helps organisations adopt emerging technologies responsibly. The business model is modest and deliberately so: paid live training and platform licensing fund the free online training and the open-source work. There is no venture capital, no outside investors, and nobody upstairs asking why we give away the thing other people charge for.
Charter
Three commitments, in writing.
These constrain who we work with and what we will teach. They have cost us work, which is the only evidence that they are real.
Non-partisan
The methodology, the research, the training, and the platform decisions do not carry a political position and are not shaded towards one.
Non-religious
We serve organisations of every belief and none, and the free programme is not a lever for anything.
Non-violent
Qualifying organisations operate under a non-violent mission. This is a line, not a preference.
The SD-Agile Project
The nonprofit half of the work.
The founders created the SD-Agile Project to do two things that do not pay for themselves: give the training away, and build open-source software for the public benefit.
Everything on learning.sd-agile.com is the Project's work — fifteen courses across six credentials, in six languages, with the courses free for the people the charter names. That is the larger share of what has been built, and it generates no revenue by design.
The distinction matters when you are trying to work out what we are. HyperAlliant sells live training to organisations that can afford it and licenses the platform. The SD-Agile Project gives training away and publishes software. The first one pays for the second.
Open source
Software we build and give away.
The Project builds real applications with the platform and releases them. It is a growing collection; today it is two.
Integrated worker experience platform
A consolidated view of the systems a worker actually has to touch, built to demonstrate that specification-first development produces something usable rather than merely well documented.
Integrated enhancement and bug capture
Capture, triage, and route enhancement requests and defects — feeding them back into the specification rather than straight into a backlog nobody has read since spring.
Neither repository is public yet. When they are, the links land here.
The book
The Spec-Driven Enterprise
The Definitive SD-Agile Playbook — the long-form argument behind the methodology, written by Joe.
The case is straightforward. Every other mature engineering discipline — civil, electrical, chemical, aerospace — builds from signed specifications before production starts. Software is the only one that normalised building from narrative fragments and treating the resulting rework as the cost of doing business.
AI is what makes that unsustainable rather than merely expensive. A human filling a gap with a guess produced one wrong thing a day. A model filling the same gap produces thousands an hour, all of them plausible and all of them confident. The book is finished being argued and is not yet finished being published; it will be available in the coming months.
Leadership
The people behind HyperAlliant.
Joe Paiva
Founder & Chief Alignment Authority
Created the SD-Agile methodology and wrote The Spec-Driven Enterprise. Former CIO of the International Trade Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce, with a career across the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and public-sector technology. Army veteran. Has shut down a data centre, moved an agency to cloud, and cut a budget by 17 per cent in two years — and will tell you which parts of that he got wrong.
Lauren Paiva
Board Member
Co-founder of bConvergent and OrthoSpot, with a long record of advocacy work on homelessness. Brings the outside view on whether the public benefit commitments are real or decorative.