HyperAlliant · Maryland Benefit Company
Learn SD-Agile from the people who created it.
HyperAlliant's mission is to provide technology education for the public good, and be a trusted, non-partisan source of education and training that helps organizations adopt emerging technology responsibly.
Joe Paiva created the SD-Agile methodology and wrote The Spec-Driven Enterprise — The Definitive SD-Agile Playbook. You learn it from him and the people who built the platform, not from a training vendor who licensed a slide deck last quarter.
Full-time government and nonprofit employees take our online courses free. If you're unemployed or underemployed, tuition waivers are available.
Two ways to learn
Two doors. Same methodology.
One is free and self-paced. The other comes to your organization and is built around what your teams actually do. Most people start with the first.
The SD-Agile Project · Nonprofit
Free, self-paced, online
The SD-Agile Project is the nonprofit side of what we do. It exists to put this training in front of people who are never going to get a budget line for it.
- 15 courses, six languages, your own pace
- Free for full-time government and nonprofit employees
- Tuition waivers if you're out of work or underemployed
HyperAlliant · Paid
Live training, built for your organization
We plan and schedule a program around what your agency or company actually needs, instead of handing you a fixed catalog and asking you to squeeze into it.
- Two-hour seminars through multi-week certification programs
- In person, or as synchronous online classes
- Delivered in any of the six languages
Public benefit
If you serve the public, you don't pay.
This is the part of the charter that actually costs us something, which is how you know we mean it.
Government and nonprofit employees
Full-time employees of government agencies and nonprofits take our online courses free. You apply when you register — no purchase order, no procurement cycle, no waiting on somebody's budget.
Unemployed and underemployed
If you're between jobs or working below your skill level, tuition waivers are available. Ask when you register; we handle those requests the same way we handle nonprofit access.
Certification
Six credentials, in order.
You start at Foundation. Each rung assumes the one below it. The last two aren't coursework — they're evidence.
- 01SD-Agile Foundation
The vocabulary and the argument. Where everybody starts. - 02Certified Specification Author
Write specifications a machine can build from without guessing. - 03Certified Alignment Authority
Own the integrity of a Build Package and adjudicate what's ambiguous. - 04Certified Org Admin
Run the platform for an organization and curate its library. - 05Enterprise Practitioner — Level 1
The coursework plus a documented real-world implementation. - 06Enterprise Practitioner — Level 2
A body of work, attested by an already-certified practitioner.
The platform
Software that makes the discipline enforceable.
You can practice SD-Agile with a text editor and a lot of willpower. The platform is for when willpower stops scaling.
Spec Studio Available now
Where intent gets encoded before any code is generated: Elicit, Review & Instruct, and Library. Available as SaaS, on the Azure Marketplace, or as a cloud-neutral download you run yourself.
Learn more →Learning Platform Available now
How training gets delivered at scale — cohorts, progress tracking, credential attestation, six languages. Same three delivery options.
Learn more →App Builder & Deployment Beta
Turn an approved specification into running, deployed software. Free for beta customers now; general availability planned for Q4 2026.
Learn more →Compliance Corridor Beta
Compliance as hard walls before generation, not a review after it. Free for beta customers now; general availability planned for Q4 2026.
Learn more →Six languages
Built multilingual. Not translated later.
US English, Commonwealth English, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, French, and Canadian French — in the training and in the platform.
Most training gets built in English and translated when somebody complains. It shows. The diagrams stay in English, the examples stay American, and a good chunk of the meaning falls out in transit. We author every course as content plus a string table from the first slide, so adding a language is a rebuild rather than a rewrite. Your team in Montréal gets the same course as your team in Maryland, down to the labels inside the diagrams.
Why this exists
AI doesn't remove ambiguity. It industrializes it.
Every requirement you didn't write down is a decision somebody has to make anyway. When a human made it, you got one guess a day. Now you get thousands an hour.
That distance between what you said and what the machine had to assume is the Inference Gap, and it is where enterprise software actually goes wrong — not in the code, in what nobody wrote down. Every other engineering profession builds from signed specifications before production starts. Software is the only one that normalized building from narrative fragments and hoping it works out. That was survivable when humans were the bottleneck. It is not survivable now.
Our other work
Two other things, and that's it.
We are a small company. We teach, we license the platform, and we sponsor open source. There is no fourth thing.
Platform licensing
For organizations that want to run the platform themselves — as SaaS, from the Azure Marketplace, or cloud-neutral on their own infrastructure. Licensing revenue is part of what pays for the free training.
Learn more →Sponsored open source
The SD-Agile Project builds free and open-source software with the platform and gives it away. A growing collection — currently an integrated worker experience platform and an integrated enhancement and bug capture system.
Learn more →Why a benefit company
The math only works one way.
How can the courses be free? Because somebody else is paying for them.
HyperAlliant is a Maryland public benefit company. The paid work — live training for organizations that can afford it, and platform licensing — funds the free online training and the open-source software. That is the entire model. No venture capital, no outside investors, and nobody upstairs asking why we give away the thing other people charge for. Government contractors and commercial organizations pay. People who serve the public don't.
Start
Pick a door.
Creating an account takes about two minutes. Browsing the catalog doesn't even require that.