Note on Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 Real Software Engineering by Glenn Vanderburg via Confreaks

The empirical process model provides and exercises control through frequent inspection and adaptation for processes that are imperfectly defined and generate unpredictable and unrepeatable outputs.

Chemical Engineering tends to be heavily biased towards an empirical process model. Often industrial engineering is the same way

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Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 Real Software Engineering by Glenn Vanderburg

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This is in direct contrast to the defined process model (which too many software development programs attempt).