SV: [xml-dev] Designing an experiment to gather evidence onapproaches to

[Sigfrid Lundberg <slu@kb.dk>]

There is a difference between science and engineering. Good engineering does not necessarily deal with statistical samples and placebo treatments. If it had, enterprise computer systems had looked very differently and some would say that J2E hadn't even existed. 

However, historical experiments are usually impossible, and when possibly usually unethical.

Happy new year

Sigfrid
________________________________________
Fra: John Cowan [cowan@ccil.org] på vegne af John Cowan [cowan@mercury.ccil.org]
Sendt: 29. december 2011 06:45
Til: Richard Salz
Cc: Costello, Roger L.; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Emne: Re: [xml-dev] Designing an experiment to gather evidence on       approaches to designing web services

Richard Salz scripsit:

> A large financial services firm in the Boston area converted from a
> variety of data silo's to an all-XML storage and data-interchange
> infrastructure and was able to decommission a significant number of
> servers.
>
> Is that evidence or anecdote?  How can you tell?  Suppose I removed all
> the vagueness and replaced it with concrete numbers?

Anecdote either way.  Scientific (as opposed to legal) evidence requires a
planned test set between two or more alternatives, holding everything not
being tested as equal as possible, with enough individual tests to make
statistical inference meaningful, and with safeguards to avoid deceit or
(more difficult) self-deceit by the investigator.

In the nature of things, such gold-standard evidence testing is not
always possible.

--
So they play that [tune] on                     John Cowan
their fascist banjos, eh?                       cowan@ccil.org
        --Great-Souled Sam                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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