Empirical Methods

Goal

Bring empirical rigor to engineering decisions so that claims about performance, quality, or user behavior rest on evidence rather than intuition. This skill operationalizes the empirical-methods strand of the SWEBOK v4 "Engineering Foundations" knowledge area: measurement theory (scales, validity, reliability), hypothesis and experiment design (design of experiments, controls, confound management), honest statistical interpretation of benchmarks and A/B results (significance, effect size, confidence intervals), and root-cause analysis as an engineering method. It pairs with the skills that gather the raw numbers — system-benchmark.skill for performance measurement and product-analytics.skill for user-behavior metrics — and ties its experiment artifact to EXPERIMENT_PLAN_TEMPLATE.md.