The Toilet Paper

Science

Mostly just summaries of scientific papers for people without an academic background.

  1. The Docker whale in Twitter’s classic fail whale image

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    Should you upgrade official Docker Hub images in production environments?

    Docker makes it easy to upgrade applications in production environments in-place, but not without risk.

  2. A new king stands on top of his dead predecessor

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    Understanding information needs of agile teams to improve requirements communication

    Casual reminder: “Working software over comprehensive documentation” does not mean that you don’t have to document requirements.

  3. Batman’s bat signal is visible in the sky

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    Inter-team coordination mechanisms in large-scale agile

    This week’s article describes how a Norwegian company coordinates its agile teams.

  4. Mark Zuckerberg diverts a trolley into a group of tied people so that it doesn’t hit a stack of bills.

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    Does ACM’s code of ethics change ethical decision making in software development?

    ACM’s code of ethics isn’t very effective, but maybe something else is…

  5. Portal’s black forest cake

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    Truth is a lie: Crowd truth and the seven myths of human annotation

    There’s no such thing as the truth, so it makes no sense to treat human annotations as either right or wrong.

  6. Excerpt from American Chopper meme

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    Expressions of sentiments during code reviews: Male vs. female

    Men and women express their feelings in code reviews differently. That’s not necessarily a good thing.

  7. Cavemen try to ride up a hill in a car made of stone

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    Old habits die hard: Why refactoring for understandability does not give immediate benefits

    Refactoring code improves code maintainability, reusability, and other “ilities”, but does not speed up development – at least not at first.

  8. A person looks through a telescope at a starry sky, unaware of their immediate surroundings.

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    “That’s beyond the scope of this paper”

    A quaint little study on the phrase “that’s beyond the scope…” in academic literature.

  9. Researcher serves surveys at a party

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    Crowdsourcing in computing education research: Case Amazon MTurk

    Crowdsourcing survey responses using Amazon Mechanical Turk is easy. But how useful are those responses?

  10. A whizz-kid, a sysadmin, a fresh graduate, and an idiot hold up number signs

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    Measuring programming experience

    Studies about programming often need to control for programming experience. What’s the best way to do that?

  11. Ruler that tells you how much your code sucks using emojis

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    An empirical validation of cognitive complexity as a measure of source code understandability

    There’s a new way to measure the understandability of your source code and this time it actually seems to work reasonably well.

  12. Face-masked pirate with a selfie stick boards a ship

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    Please turn your cameras on: Remote onboarding of software developers during a pandemic

    This week’s paper discusses the challenges of remotely onboarding new developers at Microsoft.

  13. A happy cupcake, a happy pie and a happy chocolate bar

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    Would you prefer pie or cupcakes?

    For Pi Day we take a look at best practices for data visualisations from the perspective of design professionals and normal people.

  14. Construction worker pretends to check the work of his colleague

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    When testing meets code review: Why and how developers review tests

    Why do developers find it so hard to review test code?

  15. Traditional reporter rides a disgruntled data unicorn

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    Finding the data unicorn: A hierarchy of hybridity in data and computational journalism

    How is data journalism treated in Canada’s legacy news organisations?

  16. Roman emperor gives a thumbs up to a subject from the lower classes

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    Evaluating ontological decisions with OntoClean

    A look at domain modelling from an academic perspective.

  17. Broken image with two sticky notes

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    Are static analysis violations really fixed?

    Static analysis tools are often used to find inconsistencies and possible bugs in code. But what happens next?

  18. Google has the tendency to send people to the left

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    Search as a news curator: The role of Google in shaping attention to news information

    Conservatives often claim that tech companies like Google are biased towards liberal sources. They might be right.

  19. Dwight heats up door handle using torch

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    Automating chaos experiments in production

    The people at Netflix tell you how they intentionally break things on production to test remote procedure calls.

  20. Suspicious van that promises free candy to children

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    Understanding children’s perception of privacy risks online

    The Internet can be a dangerous place. Do children understand this?

  21. Two planning poker participants have made the same estimates

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    Using planning poker for combining expert estimates in software projects

    You probably already know or even use planning poker. This paper tells you how well it works.

  22. King Arthur and his loyal servant Patsy

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    Negative results for software effort estimation

    The reports of COCOMO’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

  23. Traveller waits to for a pickup truck

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    Scalable transfer patterns

    Path finding algorithms for public transport take a little bit more work to get right than those for private transport.

  24. People queueing for the restroom

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    Gender diversity and women in software teams

    Tech is largely dominated by men and that’s not good for anyone.