Should Computer Scientists Experiment More? -- Walter Tichy

Intro

I'm Puneeth, and I would like to talk about this paper

Should Computer Scientists Experiment More? -- Walter Tichy (https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/softmine2007/Papers/tichy98.pdf). I was listening to a wonderful podcast on Ruby Rogues -- What We Actually Know About Software Development and Why We Believe It's True with Greg Wilson and Andreas Stefik -- and there was a very interesting discussion on conducting experimental studies in computer science and basing our development and future work on empirical evidence, instead of guesstimates. This paper was mentioned in the podcast. It is a quite simple paper, and I picked it for it simplicity, since this is our first meetup and hopefully will lead to a good discussion on the topic.

Abstract

Computer scientists and practitioners defend their lack of experimentation with a wide range of arguments. Some arguments suggest that experimentation is inappropriate, too difficult,useless, and even harmful. This article discusses several such arguments to illustrate the importance of experimentation for computer science.

Details
We hope that you'll read the paper before the meetup, but don't stress if you can't.

See https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-hyderabad/messages/boards/thread/48554457 for discussion.