Experiments in Computing: A Survey

Table 1

Analogy between the scientific method, Colburn’s [43] “solution engineering,” and Bartley’s [44] view of debugging.

The Scientific method	Solution engineering	Debugging
Formulate a hypothesis for explaining a phenomenon	Formulate an algorithm for solving a problem	Make a guess as to what causes an identified bug
Test the hypothesis by conducting an experiment	Test the algorithm by writing and running a program	Test the guess by, for instance, tracing the program states
Confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis by evaluating the results of the experiment	Accept or reject the algorithm by evaluating the results of running the program	Accept or reject the guess by evaluating the program states