Science
Mostly just summaries of scientific papers for people without an academic background.
The Toilet Paper
Understanding large-scale software – A hierarchical view
Program comprehension often focusses on the understanding of code, but in practice that often won’t be enough.
The Toilet Paper
Practitioners’ views on good software testing practices
A look at some best practices for software testing.
The Toilet Paper
Beyond the code itself: How programmers really look at pull requests
An eye tracker shows what developers look at when they see a pull request.
The Toilet Paper
Migrating to GraphQL: A practical assessment
Facebook’s GraphQL looks very promising, but is it ready for primetime?
The Toilet Paper
The use of UML in software maintenance and its perceived benefits and hurdles
UML documentation makes maintenance easier, but ironically can also be hard to maintain. What practices should you follow or avoid?
The Toilet Paper
Is beautiful really usable?
This week’s lesson: don’t believe everything you read (or at least try to look for multiple credible sources).
The Toilet Paper
What is beautiful is usable
If you have a neckbeard colleague who thinks websites and apps should have ugly spartan user interfaces, show them this paper.
The Toilet Paper
Uncovering architectural design decisions
Poorly documented code can tell you what it does, but not what why. Issue trackers can help you rediscover that “why”.
The Toilet Paper
Studying the impact of adopting continuous integration on the delivery time of pull requests
Continuous integration should make everything faster, but it can actually slow things down too.
The Toilet Paper
Exploring ScrumBut – An empirical study of Scrum anti-patterns
Of course you use Scrum – everyone does! But…
The Toilet Paper
Cross-cultural web usability model
Make sure your website doesn’t look or behave like a lost tourist.
The Toilet Paper
Teamwork quality and project success in software development: A survey of agile development teams
Answers to all the questions you never had about teams.
The Toilet Paper
How do design decisions affect the distribution of software metrics?
The authors of this week’s paper built a tool that can infer the design role of classes and let it analyse some Java projects.
The Toilet Paper
Do software engineers use autocompletion features differently than other developers?
If you suspect that Betteridge’s law of headlines strikes again, you’re probably right.
The Toilet Paper
Does it really matter to test-first or to test-last?
Debunking some myths about the effectiveness of test-driven development.
The Toilet Paper
I’m leaving you, Travis: A continuous integration breakup story
What makes people abandon their continuous integration service?
The Toilet Paper
Intrusion of software robots into journalism
Robots might take over jobs in journalism. What else is new(s)?
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Measuring perceived usability: The CSUQ, SUS, and UMUX
It’s a battle of standardised usability questionnaires.
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The pricey bill of technical debt: When and by whom will it be paid?
Everyone keeps talking about how technical debt is bad, but how bad is it really?
The Toilet Paper
On the usage of Pythonic idioms
Ways to ensure that all code is equal and no code is more equal than others.
The Toilet Paper
Empirical study on the relationship between developer’s working habits and efficiency
Bottom line: don’t overdo it.
The Toilet Paper
Do programmers work at night or during the weekend?
It’s time to bust some myths about programmers’ working hours.
The Toilet Paper
JIT feedback – what experienced developers like about static analysis
Dos and don’ts for people who implement static analysis tools for developers.
The Toilet Paper
Micro-clones in evolving software
Duplicate code. Duplicate code everywhere.