experimentation

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The act, process, or practice of experimenting.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act or practice of making experiments; the process of experimenting.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The act of experimenting; practice by experiment.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun The act of experimenting; practice by experiment.
• noun sciences A set of actions and observations, performed to verify or falsify a hypothesis or to research a causal relationship between phenomena.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the act of conducting a controlled test or investigation
• noun the testing of an idea