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

8

Being Experimental

Experimentation is defined as “a procedure carried out to support, refute, or validate a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated.”¹

Taking an experimental approach to solving problems is profoundly important. I would argue that science, and the experimental practice at its heart, is what differentiates our modern, high-tech society from the agrarian societies that preceded us, more than anything else. Human beings have existed as a distinct species for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet the rate of progress that we have made in the last 300 or 400 years since Newton or Galileo, periods that most people would mark as the ...