This is also wrapped up with the notion of cargo-culting, which is common in tech. If you examine a successful company or team to try and work out why they're s

This is also wrapped up with the notion of cargo-culting, which is common in tech. If you examine a successful company or team to try and work out why they're successful, you tend to focus on the most obvious factors: Their structure (or lack of it) and the tools and processes they use. But there is no way to know which if any of these factors are key to their success, or incidental, and getting a different team to use the same structure, or to apply the same tools and processes may produce a very different result. Discussions about software development methodologies, programming languages and frameworks often fall into this trap. A developer will advocate a particular approach based on anecdotal experience where it has been effective for a different company or team. A mass of these anecdotes, strongly influenced by survivor bias, becomes the macro dev culture in which different ideological "movements" rise and fall. But there's very little attempt to thoroughly and scientifically research the effect of varying factors independent of others with the mainstream.