The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist.
~ Karl Pearson
I recently was helping a technical leader to set the yearly goals for his company. He was struggling to phrase the goals he wanted to set for the team; not because he did not know what he wanted, but because he was unsure how he would know a goal was acheived or not.
We talked for a while about the goals themselves. The scientific method came up during the conversation and I prompted him to phrase his goal as an hypothesis.
Phrasing an hypothesis well is harder than people think and most of the times people fall short. A good hypothesis is clear, specific, testable, and above all state an expected outcome and relationship between the variables that either support or refute it through research.
Here is an example of a bad hypothesis statement:
Test Driven Development makes code design cleaner
The issue with this statement is that we cannot measure anything; it’s just an opinion with no way of testing it. We could rewrite this like so:
Software Engineers who apply Test Driven Development practices for twelve weeks will produce code with significantly higher design quality scores as measured by cyclomatic complexity, coupling metrics, and code cohesion indices compared to engineers using a code first approach.
This statement on the other hand will allow us to test the hypothesis, which leads me to the title of the blog post H.E.A.T.. You know if your hypothesis is well phrased when you can apply heat to it (thanks to Alan for the acronym).
- H: The Hypothesis statement is clear, specific, testable and states an outcome.
- E: The Experiment is well defined with clear boundaries and desired outcomes.
- A: The experiment will the Acheived when the statement of the hypothesis has been supported or refuted.
- T: The experiment will be finished within a Timebox.
Are you applying H.E.A.T. to your theories and goals?