Reviewing my RSS feeds today, I came across an article on The Register about a probably mythical research showing that bugs are one hundred times more expensive to fix in production that is worth reading. Aside from the fact that it stands out how easy fake news spread to fields other than politics and mainstream news, what truly drew my attention was how, in spite of the efforts of empirical software engineering and similar, the field is still undeveloped from a scientific point of view. As one of the experts cited in the piece states, different studies "use different definitions of defect". When there is no overall agreement on what the terms mean, it is quite difficult (if not impossible) to do good, rigorous research. On top of that, as the same person suggested, "the academic incentive structures are not aligned in a way that would give industry actionable information" because "there's much more incentive to create new models and introduce new innovations than do the necessary 'gruntwork' that would be most useful." That, I'm afraid, applies to many other areas of research, but especially those financed with private money. Overall, I'd say the state of affairs in the world of software engineering is not so different from what we would find in the field of humanities. Lots of opinion, but little science, in spite of the name. Regardless, all hope is not lost. The article itself includes two relevant pieces of advice for solid programming: "code review is a good way to find software bugs and spread software knowledge", and "shorter iteration cycles and feedback loops lead to higher quality software than long lead times." {link to this entry}