Engineering The Practical Application of Science

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Modern Software Engineering

Software development is a process of discovery and exploration; therefore, to succeed at it, software engineers need to become experts at learning.

Humanity’s best approach to learning is science, so we need to adopt the techniques and strategies of science and apply them to our problems.

This is often misunderstood to mean that we need to become physicists measuring things to unreasonable, in the context of software, levels of precision.

Engineering is more pragmatic than that.

What I mean when I say we should apply the techniques and strategies of science is that we should apply some pretty basic, but nevertheless extremely important, ideas.

Characterize

Make an observation of the current state

Hypothesize

Create a description, a theory that may explain your observation

Predict

Make a prediction based on your hypothesis

Experiment

Test your prediction