"According to the known guidelines for empirical research in software engineering (see for example [16, 17]), it is necessary to make explicit all elements that

"According to the known guidelines for empirical research in software engineering (see for example [16, 17]), it is necessary to make explicit all elements that potentially threaten the validity of an experiment." Or, y'know, according to any basic understanding of science whatsoever. Jesus. They're essentially trying to test whether static typing optimises development time, and as with any optimisation, you only see a substantial increase if you're optimising the bottleneck. Static typing won't show any speed benefits if your coders are being slowed down by weird abstractions, poor tooling, or analysis of the problem. The experiment didn't focus on use of the type system, but nor did it actually test anything close to a real-world scenario. All in all, it seems worthless to me.