The Toilet Paper

Science

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

  1. An angry mobster interrogates a programmer who didn’t comment their code

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    Deep code comment generation

    Why write comments in your code when you can also generate them?

  2. A pirate examines a treasure map

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    Deep code search

    Machine learning can be used to create better search engines for code.

  3. Simulating a functional fast food restaurant chain kiosk using paper prototypes

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    Loud and interactive paper prototyping in requirements elicitation: What is it good for?

    Paper prototyping is an effective way to get early feedback on your designs.

  4. A television crew interviews someone with two microphones, but the camera is still on the ground

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    Learning from mistakes: An empirical study of elicitation interviews performed by novices

    Some useful tips and tricks for your next interview.

  5. Harvard Business School’s Baker Library / Bloomberg Center gets a new European post-war addition

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    Are developers aware of the architectural impact of their changes?

    I mean, surely this tiny addition is not going to have any noticeable effect on the system’s architecture?

  6. IT Crowd’s Moss awkwardly holds a fire extinguisher that’s on fire

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    Are code examples on an online Q&A forum reliable? A study of API misuse on Stack Overflow

    I actually don’t know anyone who blindly copies stuff from Stack Overflow, but apparently it’s a thing.

  7. People with different jobs, tied to a Dutch windmill

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    Building a theory of job rotation in software engineering from an instrumental case study

    Change is good, especially for knowledge workers.

  8. A model marionette is being controlled for a show that’s viewed by a theatre audience

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    Code smells for model-view-controller architectures

    Here’s a list of six things you should not do in an MVC architecture.

  9. A KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Dreamliner expects to arrive 20 minutes earlier

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    Predicting estimated time of arrival for commercial flights

    Achieving better ETA prediction using machine learning.

  10. An orange president waves an American flag, while also holding a Russian one

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    Fake news vs satire: A dataset and analysis

    Can you spot the difference between fake news and satire?

  11. A football player that doesn’t shoot balls into the goal

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    Does goal-oriented requirements engineering achieve its goal?

    Requirements engineering generally isn’t taken very seriously. Why not?

  12. Impossible teapot on a table

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    A large-scale empirical study on linguistic antipatterns affecting APIs

    Does it matter if your method names contain tiny linguistic mistakes? Possibly.

  13. An archaeologist investigates some unusual hieroglyphs inside an Egyptian tomb

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    Automatically assessing code understandability: How far are we?

    Forget LOC and cyclomatic complexity; can we just calculate the understandability of code directly?

  14. A bunch of office workers not doing their work at the office

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    Software development waste

    Many different types of waste can occur in software development. Here are nine of them.

  15. A catholic monk and a Renaissance scientist debate about astronomical models

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    Belief & evidence in empirical software engineering

    Do we actually follow best practices or just… practices?

  16. Some Buy ORM employees trying to retrieve something for the customer in an inefficient way

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    How not to structure your database-backed web applications

    ORM frameworks make your life a lot easier, but can just as easily lead to performance problems.

  17. Two programmers with the dreaded wait cursor and beach ball in their heads

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    Do you remember this source code?

    I’ll tell you what, I don’t even remember writing this article.

  18. Interviewer uses a very crude way to find that rare ninja rockstar unicorn software developer

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    Enhancing person-job fit for talent recruitment: An ability-aware neural network approach

    Use machine learning to select the best candidate for your organisation.

  19. Some old Dutch banknotes with a ladybug on one of the notes

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    An industrial evaluation of unit test generation: Finding real faults in a financial application

    Why write tests if you can let a computer write them for you?

  20. A researcher who looks at someone who is looking for a job in a cardboard box filled with jobs

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    Online job search: Study of users’ search behavior using search engine query logs

    How people use search engines to find their new job.

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

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

    Let’s talk about those 10x developers from a project perspective.

  22. A usability study is conducted on a website

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    Rethinking thinking aloud: A comparison of three think-aloud protocols

    There are different ways to do think-aloud. Some are better than others.

  23. 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

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

    You want comments in your code, but probably not too many.

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

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    Characteristics of useful code reviews: An empirical study at Microsoft

    Some tips that can help you streamline your code review pipeline.