Software development is not art. Nor is it a craft.

It is experimental science — at least when done well. It's the "applied" discipline to the computer science.

A hypothesis and experiment are everywhere throughout the field. A unit test is an experiment to verify that a piece of code does what we think it does. A good unit test is falsifiable — it is designed to fail if the underlying hypothesis is false (hence why TDD preaches writing tests first).

Production canaries are an experiment that verifies the hypothesis of the program's expectations of its environment match the real environment. The best monitoring and alerting I've ever seen was written in the same style: to detect whether an assumption holds true.

It strikes me that a lot of hype bubbles in tech are akin to pseudoscience: there is a kernel of truth to them, but they disregard any sign that opposes their desired conclusion.