If you search for "science" in this article, you will have great difficulty in figuring out what the title means, unless you are smarter than me, which is entirely possible.
It's about the difficulty/expense of systematically and scientifically studying the software development process (e.g. finding out what data actually exists to support the claim that "a bug is cheaper to squash when it is caught during the specification process").
The title expresses frustration not at science itself, but at how needlessly difficult this process is, since both the secondary and primary academic literature surrounding it are of extremely low quality.
Why is it like sociology or psychology? Because it's about people, not about things. Software engineering is not just about languages and programming techniques; it's about how people interact with those languages and techniques. The people have far more variability than the languages and techniques do. Cutting through that to be able to accurately say something about any language or technique is... really hard.
Both suffer from abstraction.
I think psychology when closer to biology is similar to programming like running the programming language C experiments.
Maybe safety critical C or assembly is engineering.
Maybe testing code for speed can be considered science.
By the time any useful program is finished, there's significantly more tradition and art than Science and engineering.
In principle, I'm in favor of this endeavor, and the article at hand expresses frustration about apparently arbitrary barriers towards accomplishing these measurements.
I don't know about you, but I'm generally always in favor of "let's measure more things and build more models from that data, to make sure we're actually improving"