Experimentation is the key to new discoveries. You’ve probably seen some variation of this definition of science at some point in your life:

Systematic knowledge of the physical or material world 
gained through observation and experimentation.

The computer you’re using to read this was developed through decades of experimentation–and there’s still so much more to come. Just look at how computers have changed over just the last ten years!

Okay so what’s the point? Well, I’m talking about this because I think a big part of our job involves experimentation. There are tons of little things to experiment on that eventually lead up to one big discovery.

Why waste the time?

You’ve probably seen some problems arise here and there at work. You’re told the workaround for the issue, which may only take five minutes of your time, but why is the problem occurring in the first place? Is it a bug in the code, an environmental issue, a user issue?

I used to work in an IT support role where we would be sent issues that were occurring in production and need to fix them. We had tons of queries and scripts like Fix_XYZ.sql or Fix_ABC.ps1 that only took five minutes of our time. This didn’t sit well with me–why do we have all these scripts? If it’s broken, why don’t we just fix it so that it never happens again? If this sounds familiar, then start researching and experimenting here.

In the same role, there was a process that someone on the team had to do every week from five to seven in the morning. This process had been going on for years. What a waste of time! What an awful work experience! How can this be improved? After some research and experimentation, we found that all we needed was to update a database value the day before–the rest of the process would happen automatically.

You will probably spend days testing different variables that have no impact. Time wasted! There will be a lot of this. Days, weeks, or even months of your time with nothing to show for it. While this can happen, at least you have a ton of examples of things that don’t work, and potentially a new direction that can be derived from your research. Progress!