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We don’t need another hero? The impact of “heroes” in software development (2018)

A well-equipped Greek hoplite and some not-so-well equipped servants

Hero developers are often thought to be bad for software projects, due to their tendency to write code on their own without collaborating with team members. This paper by Agrawal, Rahman, Krishna, Sobran, and Menzies attemps to debunk that myth, but also leaves the most important question unanswered.

Rethinking thinking aloud: A comparison of three think-aloud protocols (2018)

A usability study is conducted on a website

Think-aloud is one of the most popular methods used to evaluate usability of websites and other types of systems. Various think-aloud methods exist. Alhadreti and Mayhew compared three of them – concurrent, retrospective, and hybrid think-aloud — and found that one clearly outperforms the other two.

When not to comment: Questions and tradeoffs with API documentation for C++ projects (2018)

A very simple to use interface that is accompanied by a way too elaborate manual, and a complex interface that only comes with an empty sticky note

Many developers dislike writing documentation. However, if someone else’s code isn’t sufficiently well-documented, they’re often the first to complain about it. Thanks to this study by Head, Sadowski, Murphy-Hill, and Knight, we now know how much you should invest in API documentation (and how much you can get away with).

Characteristics of useful code reviews: An empirical study at Microsoft (2015)

Developers queueing in line to have their code reviewed by an Arstotzka inspector

Last week, we’ve learnt that reviewing and discussing code is a good way to catch bugs. That obviously doesn’t mean you should meticulously review and start arguments about every single line of code – but what should you do then? This week I discuss a paper by Bosu, Greiler, and Bird that explains what makes code reviews useful.

The impact of code review coverage and code review participation on software quality (2014)

Turrets being accepted or rejected on an assembly line

Code reviews are often used as a way to make sure that bad code doesn’t make it into public releases. Not all code reviews are equal for that purpose however, as this study by McIntosh, Kamei, Adams, and Hassan shows.

Datetime formatting in Go

Close-up of a disassembled flip clock

Go’s time package takes a novel approach to defining datetime serialisation formats. Is it an improvement over existing alternatives?