Who Needs Evidence, Anyway?

In daily life, we face any number of problems and what seems like an ever-increasing list of possible solutions. The process of building and acquiring software is equally fraught with momentous decisions. However, the infrastructure to help people make informed decisions isn´t as well developed. There´s certainly no dearth of advertisements for new and improved ways of doing things, nor do we lack vendors´ testimonials that their tool, approach, or methodology will solve the big problems. And a lot of people make decisions by hearing what solutions have worked for other people, whether around the water cooler or on discussion boards. Still, we usually can´t easily access a helpful set of evidence from other folks, covering many of the decisions that we´d like to make.