Watch this video (Can You Solve This? by Veritasium) to see the scientific process in action (well it takes a while for the people to become scientific... but they do). My guess is that you - like me - will fall into the fallacy of confirmation bias at the first opportunity. A phenomena referred to as the black swan fallacy.
So scientific processes have a little trick up their sleeves called the Null Hypothesis. The null hypothesis, or default answer, is generally assumed true until evidence indicates otherwise. How often do you use this process to mutate your software development process? How do you protect yourself from the confirmation bias during your process improvement experiments? Do you see this null hypothesis at work in the TDD process of proving a unit test fails before the implementation code creates evidence to indicate otherwise?
Since this scientific process is not very natural for us humans; it leaves me to wonder how we learned this process. One common answer is Bacon! Francis Bacon to be precise - Voltaire called Bacon the father of the experimental method.
Be careful with a southern US accent when you communicate Francis Bacon - you may create this mental model.
"...it's a process, not an ideology..."
So scientific processes have a little trick up their sleeves called the Null Hypothesis. The null hypothesis, or default answer, is generally assumed true until evidence indicates otherwise. How often do you use this process to mutate your software development process? How do you protect yourself from the confirmation bias during your process improvement experiments? Do you see this null hypothesis at work in the TDD process of proving a unit test fails before the implementation code creates evidence to indicate otherwise?
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| France is Bacon |
Since this scientific process is not very natural for us humans; it leaves me to wonder how we learned this process. One common answer is Bacon! Francis Bacon to be precise - Voltaire called Bacon the father of the experimental method.Be careful with a southern US accent when you communicate Francis Bacon - you may create this mental model.
And now for some serious fun - Hank Green's song I F***ing Love Science.
"...it's a process, not an ideology..."
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