I don't think research should be as structured as software development. In CS, many of the most interesting papers come about when the authors discover something unexpected or non-intuitive and choose to explore down that thread. That's why it's research -- sometimes you can't know what you will find until you're there.
I don't think research should be as structured as software development
In many ways, it already is: good research requires meticulous log keeping in order to reproduce results, and equal effort must be spent on maintaining references to other literature, or you risk missing a citation in a published paper.
