> I have seen groups put huge amounts of work into a "fix" for a system when they are only really guessing at what the problem is.
This is sadly far more the rule than the exception. So many times I've heard "we think the problem is [wild-ass guess] and so we're going to do [lengthy re-write] to fix it." And when I say "hey uh maybe we could do [simple test] to prove whether [wild-ass guess] is actually happening?" it's "oh no we can't waste time we have to start the rewrite" or even just "huh, yeah I guess we could test it that way, anyway... we start the rewrite tomorrow".
Edit: one specific case I remember talking to a mechanical engineer about how a particular mass-spring system would react to a momentary impulse and he said "well there's no way to know what'll happen so let's just try it." Thinking back I can rationalise this answer as "we don't fully understand the dynamics of the piece of third-party equipment generating the impulse so let's just use this as a starting point" but at the time it made me so mad. Like, if only there were a discipline entirely dedicated to using mathematical modeling techniques to predict the behaviour of physical systems in order to back-calculate the necessary physical parameters to achieve a given behaviour.
This is sadly far more the rule than the exception. So many times I've heard "we think the problem is [wild-ass guess] and so we're going to do [lengthy re-write] to fix it." And when I say "hey uh maybe we could do [simple test] to prove whether [wild-ass guess] is actually happening?" it's "oh no we can't waste time we have to start the rewrite" or even just "huh, yeah I guess we could test it that way, anyway... we start the rewrite tomorrow".
Edit: one specific case I remember talking to a mechanical engineer about how a particular mass-spring system would react to a momentary impulse and he said "well there's no way to know what'll happen so let's just try it." Thinking back I can rationalise this answer as "we don't fully understand the dynamics of the piece of third-party equipment generating the impulse so let's just use this as a starting point" but at the time it made me so mad. Like, if only there were a discipline entirely dedicated to using mathematical modeling techniques to predict the behaviour of physical systems in order to back-calculate the necessary physical parameters to achieve a given behaviour.