Although you have some great points at how to win a battle in an office environment I have found a consistent issue with developers not being able to stand up for themselves. Of course there needs to be a balance, it would do no good to have a bunch of hot heads around, but I do think that a fair amount of the development inner circle needs to step it up a notch.

The easiest example I can come up with is a business analyst [or insert whom you would like here]/developer conversation about the client wanting changes and they need to be done yesterday. Now even though the developer knows they don’t have enough information or time to do it, they fail to stand up for themselves and just say they will do the work after dropping everything they are currently doing.

Now for all of you that are about to flame me, of course this isn’t “every” developer. But I have personally found the non-confrontational developer much more in the wild then the “lets work out a solution in the real world” type.