Scientific Method

What is it

• falsifiable

• dont trust experts

• science is about reverse engineering nature

• Scientific principles

  • It is adherence to Logic and Data - gathered by impartial unbiased experiments

  • Too much focus on logic -> mathematics, theories that may not be useful

  • Too much focus on data -> mechanics, can maintain stuff, but not improve it

• Engineering is the use of science to economically change society one innovation at a time

Why use it

• Otherwise we rely on cargo-cult, dogma, to guide out software creation

  • Faith and belief in experts, rather than the idea and the evidence that backs it up

  • personal opinions, people become biased, arguments (vi vs emacs)

  • Some one has an idea, it becomes popular, is used but no one questioned it

  • People relying on common sense, or using it as a reason

  • The term "Recommended Practice" or how to use it, should be a flag

  • Marketing to sell a product leads it to becoming the norm, being sold a magic bullet

  • What makes it worse and hard not to trust, is there is some grain of truth, some reasonable logic behind it

• Need an impartial way of finding the best way to develop software, which is unbiased, evidence based, impartial

Use in software creation

• Idea is to use scientific method to develop hypothesis/experiments that can be tested and have evidence that they work.

• Agile

  • is about fast feedback to use improve, restart that cycle, to narrow down on what is required

• Test first

• Learning from feedback to improve

• How to make software more like Engineering

  • Demand proof

• Never trust the manual fully

  • trust the evidence - tests, source code

  • libraries that are used, should be read

  • if no source, decompile

Theory

Difference with Mathematics/logic