Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

7

Empiricism

Empiricism, in the philosophy of science, is defined as “emphasizing evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.”¹

By this definition, empiricism is closely related to experiment. However, I keep both concepts in my list of five because experiments can be carried out in such controlled circumstances that we could easily be experimenting with ideas that don’t translate into meaningful reality, in an engineering sense.

Even in modern physical engineering, with all of our computer models and simulations, we still ...