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The Toilet PaperNegative results for software effort estimation (2017)
COCOMO is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in engineering schools, but seemingly disappears into thin air once you enter the software industry “because reliable effort estimation is a holy grail” or “because it’s obsolete”. This study shows that in the case of effort estimation methods, newer isn’t necessarily better.
“Heap, heap, array!”(Not) looping over lists in PHP
This is a lazy blog post for people who are too lazy to browse through PHP’s array function documentation. I’ll show three methods that help you create new lists or values based on an existing list: array_map(), array_reduce(), and array_filter().
The Toilet PaperScalable transfer patterns (2016)
Route planning is largely a solved problem. Route planning for public transport networks can still be challenging however, especially if it those networks need to cover the entire world. This week’s paper gives you some insight into the steps that are needed to make it work (preferably before the heat death of the universe).
Flat EarthChina Southern Airlines
English is hard and doesn’t always make sense; it’s incredibly easy to make mistakes, especially for non-native speakers. That’s totally fine. What I don’t get is how deep-pocketed corporations like China Southern Airlines can have websites and safety videos that are clearly full of mistakes.
The Toilet PaperGender diversity and women in software teams (2019)
Software development teams in western countries largely consist of males or are even male-only. Hiring policies that favour women over men can help restore the balance somewhat, but are also controversial. Do these policies actually make economical sense? Spoiler alert: yes, they do.
The Toilet PaperUnderstanding large-scale software – A hierarchical view (2019)
Large software systems are more expensive to maintain – not because changes require more code, but because it’s harder to understand such systems. Many developers and studies focus on things like cyclomatic complexity and API documentation, but they aren’t exactly helpful if you need to understand entire systems.
The Toilet PaperPractitioners’ views on good software testing practices (2019)
Good developers write good automated test cases for their work before handing it over to others or their future selves. Most of us have strong opinions on what makes automated test cases good, but let’s see what other people think!
The Toilet PaperBeyond the code itself: How programmers really look at pull requests (2019)
Approval (or rejection) of pull requests is mostly done based on its contents. But it’s not just about the code – especially when the changes are proposed by someone you don’t know. This week’s paper examines the signals that developers look at when reviewing pull requests from unfamiliar contributors.
The Toilet PaperMigrating to GraphQL: A practical assessment (2019)
Facebook’s GraphQL query language helps you create APIs that are both powerful and flexible. Its proponents often like to claim that the days of REST as the prevailing API design paradigm are over, but the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught up yet. Is now the time to make the switch?
The Toilet PaperThe use of UML in software maintenance and its perceived benefits and hurdles (2018)
UML is widely used to model software. It’s been studied extensively, so its effectiveness is well-known… for greenfield projects. Unfortunately, most projects are actually brownfield. Fernández-Sáez, Chaudron, and Genero conducted interviews at a multinational company to understand how UML is used in software maintenance.
The Toilet PaperIs beautiful really usable? (2012)
“What is beautiful is useful” showed that aesthetics and usability are highly correlated. Since then, those findings have been confirmed by some, but rejected by other studies. We also still don’t know why they’re correlated. A newer experiment conducted by Tuch et al. sheds more light on the relation between the two concepts.
The Toilet PaperWhat is beautiful is usable (2000)
Humans are subconsciously more favorable about characteristics of people who are attractive than those who are not. This “what is beautiful is good” effect exists for user interfaces. We know this thanks to Tractinsky, Katz, and Ikar, whose paper about the effect of aesthetics on perceived usability was published almost 20 years ago.
The Toilet PaperUncovering architectural design decisions (2018)
Systems are easier to maintain if one understands why its code and architecture look the way they do. Unfortunately that “why” often isn’t documented. To address this issue Shahbazian et al. developed RecovAr, a technique that allows partial recovery of design decisions from a project’s issue tracker and version control repository.
The Toilet PaperStudying the impact of adopting continuous integration on the delivery time of pull requests (2018)
Continuous integration is a practice that promises more frequent releases, which means that new functionality can be delivered more quickly to end-users. Bernardo, Da Costa, and Kulesza analysed over 160,000 pull requests from 87 GitHub projects and suggest that you may want take those claims with a grain of salt.
The Toilet PaperExploring ScrumBut – An empirical study of Scrum anti-patterns (2016)
Every time I interview with a company and ask how they develop software, they’ll say something along the lines of “We use Scrum”, followed by a long list of deviations that decidedly make it not-Scrum. Eloranta, Koskimies, and Mikkonen describe 14 of these commonly used deviations and explain what makes them harmful.
The Toilet PaperCross-cultural web usability model (2017)
Different cultures consume information in different ways. This is why a website that’s designed for a western audience might not necessarily work well for an eastern audience, and vice versa. Alexander, Murray, and Thompson propose design guidelines that make it much easier to create and evaluate usable cross-cultural websites.