The Scientific Method

Back in the 1990s I was fortunate enough to work for a very smart, energetic man. In a way, working for him — or at least in the position he gave me — helped change the trajectory of my career into what I wanted it to be.

Skipping 99% of that story ... one thing he did exceptionally well was troubleshoot problems, and troubleshoot them very fast. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was using something called The Scientific Method. After observing him for a while, I saw him repeat these steps so precisely that I thought he must have them on a tattoo on the inside of his eyelids:

1. Observe some feature, in our case, a bug
2. Hypothesize a model consistent with the observations
3. Predict future events the hypotheses should yield
4. Verify the predictions by making further observations
5. Validate by repeating