In organizing this session, Dieter Rombach invited me to provide historical perspective on a debate that he anticipated but that did not materialize. Expected to take strong stands on opposite sides of a putative disjunction between exploratory and confirmatory experimentation, the papers by Vic Basili and Barbara Kitchenham instead agreed that, given the nature of the subject and the current state of the field, both are necessary. Before one has something to confirm, one must explore, seeking patterns that might lend themselves to useful measurement. The question was not whether experiments of one sort or the other should be carried out, but rather how experiments of both sorts might be better designed. Nonetheless, some historical perspective might still be useful, not least because discussions of experimentation usually involve assumptions about its historical origins and development. It is part of the foundation myth of modern science that experiment lies at the heart of the “scientific method” created (or, for those of Platonist leaning, discovered) in the seventeenth century. That “method” often serves as a touchstone for efforts to make a scientific discipline of an enterprise and thus forms the basis for much common wisdom about where and how experiment fits into the process.