I would like to ask a question about evidence based IT is this the right section?

Question

I was thinking to software readability.

First of all I would like to explain what is an evidence based approach and how it's related to software engineering.

Disciplines like medicine use this kind of approach a lot. Every opinion has to be proved through a scientific test made in double blind. You can see thousand of examples making a search on Google Scholar. Example: link

This kind of methodology assure that nothing is lead to the personal opinion of the writer. Psychology is another discipline which passed from intuitions (see psychanalisis) to rigorous scientific approach. Not always a method is better than the other but scientific approach to software coding is almost unexistent nowaday.

My actual question is if someone knows about the usage of Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to experimentally investigate the readability of some piece of code refactoring.

I understand the question may look weird. But the actual medicine is able to "see" the effort made by the brain of a developer to understand some lines of code. So it's possible to empirically measure the readability of a source code.

One of the purpose of the question would also be to make software developer focus on the possibility (and need?) to go over the opinion based approach to a evidence based software engineering

Would my question be out of scope here?

Answer 1

The question is such that it can only be answered in a couple ways.

No

This person would have no basis in fact that he/she could authoritatively say nobody has had this idea.

Yes

Then they link to an offsite resource and a discussion breaks out. Link only answers are not acceptable here and will be deleted. Further the Q&A format of the site doesn't lend itself well to discussions. A forum or chat room would be a better platform for this.

Furthermore questions that are seeking for off site resources are explicity off topic. If this wasn't really what you were looking for then you are really looking for people to simply review your idea which means there is not a real question here thus it is not a good fit for the Q&A format.

If all of this were not the case then your question is seeking a number of opinions on this topic for purposes of debate or discussion, which doesn't fit the criteria of "Good Subjective Questions" that is outlined in our Help Center.

I do not think the question in its current form is a good fit for the site. Perhaps if you were formulating this idea and had a specific problem you were trying to think through and solve, then it might be a better fit.