> the software development industry should stop doing such a disservice to > itself, and start funding more scientific studies in software > development. Y

> the software development industry should stop doing such a disservice to > itself, and start funding more scientific studies in software > development. Yes. > hypotheses like 'naming things is hard - we should stop doing it' are given > way too much credibility with nothing to back them up. Also yes, but let's separate generating hypotheses and discussing them from giving them credibility. It's a net win for people to share their shower-time hypotheses with each other. It's a net win for sites like Hacker News to feature them so that the "long tail of thought" can stretch ever longer. But as you say, we need to keep some perspective and grant that these are hypotheses. For example, a lot of times, people try turning a dial to eleven: Long iterations are hard, what's the shortest iteration cycle? What if we try releasing every two weeks? Code review is valuable, what if we review 24/7/365 by pairing or even mob programming? Long methods are hard to understand, what if we make a rule that they can be no longer than five lines? And so forth. And they get good n=1 anecdotal results. My hypothesis is that there's a Hawthorne Effect going on: When you turn a dial to eleven, you find yourself forced to observe and think about what's going on very thoroughly, and in the process of doing so, you get better results. Then you keep doing that, and eventually the new way of doing things is internalized, and you stop being forced to think very hard about things, and you regress to your old level of hand-wavey productivity/quality/whatever. This little pet model of mine explains why things like this keep popping up, why they are often valuable exercises, but also why, as you say, we should do some real measuring before pronouncing that we're DoingItWrong™.