| >It is highly iterative work where assumptions keep being broken and reformed depending on what you are testing and working on at any given time. This is describing infinitely fast and efficient p-hacking (i.e. research that is likely to produce invalid results). If your assumptions are broken then that should ideally be reported as part of your research. When you do research, you ideally start out with fixed assumptions, and then test those assumptions. The code required to do this can be buggy (and can therefore get fixed), and you can re-purpose earlier code, but the assumptions/brief shouldn't change in the middle of the coding it up. If you aren't following the original brief, you've rejected your original research concept and you're now doing a different piece of research than you started out - and this is no longer a sound piece of research. Research should be highly dissimilar to a web design project in this respect. The reason these projects often become a tangled mess is because researchers don't have the coding skill to program any other way (in my opinion, and nor do institutions invest sufficiently in people who do have this skill). |