However, our knowledge of the human body has evolved overtime. The focus in manufacturing is to better understand and control the relationship between process and product for quality control. The nature of the discipline is that the same product is generated, over and over, based upon a set of processes, allowing the building of models with small tolerances. Manufacturing made tremendous strides in improving productivity and quality when it began to focus on observing, model building, and experimenting with variations in the process, measuring its effect on the revised product, building models of what was learned. There are researchers and practitioners.
Research has an analytic and experimental component.
The role of the researcher is to build models of and understand the nature of processes, products, and the relationship between the two in the context of the system in which they live. This mix is especially important in planning empirical studies and when formulating models and theories. Like manufacturing, these roles are symbiotic. The researcher needs laboratories and they only exist where practitioners build software systems. Just as the early model of science evolved from learning based purely on logical thought, to learning via experimentation, so must software engineering evolve.