it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence Name a book that does! The corpus of evidence in our field is quit

it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence Name a book that does! The corpus of evidence in our field is quite weak and doesn't support almost any interesting claim you might make about it. For example, there's no empirical data supporting version control [1]. There are books that purport to derive software development lessons from the research literature, but they're either not very good (because they rely on crappy studies and/or go beyond what the studies support) or not very interesting (because they merely transcribe the results of very narrow studies). An anthology of the literature was published recently [2], and it falls in the latter category. I bought it to get the state of the art in empirical research and found it contained almost nothing of use to me as a practitioner. Many of the studies were shoddy (e.g. qualitative case histories--a euphemism for "anecdote") and the better ones are so careful to limit themselves to the tiny experiments they did that you can't derive anything from them. I could mention a couple of exceptions, though, if anyone's interested. I think the root problem is that software development is complicated, so to do rigorous formal studies on it is expensive. The amount of funding available for this work is a drop in the bucket of what it would need to be. In short, the market value of empirical evidence on software development isn't high enough for anyone to pay for it. [1] http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/12/empirical-evidence-for-the-value-of-version-control.html http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/12/empirical-evidence-f.... and http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/30/why-we-need-evidence.html http://neverworkintheory.org/2012/12/30/why-we-need-evidence.... Notice that the HN discussion of the first post completely failed to answer its question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931251. [2] http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/dp/0596808321 http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe/d...