Most claims about how to build software are opinions wearing the costume of fact. “Pair programming catches more bugs.” “Microservices scale better.” “This linter improves quality.” Each sounds authoritative, and each is testable. Empirical software engineering is the discipline that does the testing: it studies how software is built, maintained, and used by collecting real data and analyzing it, instead of trusting whoever argues most confidently. Think of it like the shift medicine made a century ago. Doctors once prescribed treatments because a respected mentor swore by them. Then medicine started running trials, tracking outcomes, and pooling results across studies. Software engineering is partway through the same shift, and understanding how it works lets you tell a real finding from a well-dressed guess.