These approaches serve as a basis for distinguishing research activities from development activities. If one of these paradigms is not being used in some form, the study is most likely not a research. project. For example, building a system or tool alone is development and not research. Research involves gaining understanding about how and why a certain type of tool might be useful and by validating that a tool has certain properties or certain effects by carefully designing an experiment to measure the properties or to compare it with alternatives. An experimental method can be used to understand the effects of a particular tool usage in some environment and to validate hypotheses about how software development can best be accomplished.