The Toilet Paper
Designing and developing good software is hard, and so is managing it. If you run into problems, you can try to find solutions yourself or rely on advice based on anecdotal evidence. Scientific papers offer higher-quality information, but might not necessarily be easy to read, access or discover for people outside academia. This is why The Toilet Paper provides short summaries without the “boring” sciencey details; ideal for bathroom (and other) breaks!
What’s new
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.
The Toilet PaperTeamwork quality and project success in software development: A survey of agile development teams (2016)
A team can be greater than the sum of its parts if its members work well together. Lindsjørn et al. conducted a survey with a large number of teams to understand how teamwork quality affects the ability of teams to deliver products effectively and efficiently, and the effect it has on work satisfaction and learning on the job.
The Toilet PaperHow do design decisions affect the distribution of software metrics? (2018)
Many organisations use static analysis tools to calculate metrics, which they then use to grade the quality of their software projects. This might not necessarily be a good approach however, as this study by Dósea, Sant’Anna, and da Silva shows that metrics don’t mean that much without proper context.
The Toilet PaperDo software engineers use autocompletion features differently than other developers? (2018)
Programmers in movies are often able to crank out working code with seemingly very little effort. In real life, programmers often rely on IDE features like autocompletion to produce correct code quickly. Amlekar et al. studied the differences in autocompletion usage between people who program for a living and people who do it “on the side”.
The Toilet PaperDoes it really matter to test-first or to test-last? (2017)
Test-driven development is a development practice that involves short, iterative cycles in which the programmer writes tests before adding new functionality or refactoring existing code. It’s commonly believed that writing tests first leads to higher-quality code and improved productivity. Fucci et al. put that belief to the test.
The Toilet PaperI’m leaving you, Travis: A continuous integration breakup story (2018)
Continuous integration services allow developers to automatically build and test their code with ease. Each of those services has its own strengths and weaknesses. Widder, Hilton, Kästner, and Vasilescu studied GitHub projects that no longer use Travis CI to understand what makes developers abandon a continuous integration service.
The Toilet PaperIntrusion of software robots into journalism (2017)
Good journalism is exciting, inspiring, and informative. But there’s also a lot of mundane reporting that simply isn’t very exciting to produce. One might be tempted to automate these tasks. Are articles written by robots robust enough to withstand the watchful eyes of journalists and the general public? Jung et al. think that may be the case!
The Toilet PaperMeasuring perceived usability: The CSUQ, SUS, and UMUX (2018)
The perceived usability of an application can be measured using short questionnaires. Most practitioners will be familiar with the SUS, but it’s far from the only one. Lewis compared two other questionnaires with acronym-y names, the CSUQ and UMUX, with SUS and discovered that they have a lot in common (which is a good thing).
The Toilet PaperThe pricey bill of technical debt: When and by whom will it be paid? (2017)
Trade-offs are made in software development every day. One of these is the choice between quick solutions and better – but also more expensive – solutions. Bad choices may result in technical debt, which leads to more costs down the road. Besker, Martini, and Bosch report on the height of these costs and their causes.
The Toilet PaperOn the usage of Pythonic idioms (2018)
Design patterns are conventions that make it easier to communicate and reason about commonly occurring problems and their solutions. The Python community takes the idea of using conventions one step further, and argues that code should be “Pythonic”. Alexandru et al. explore what that means in practice.
The Toilet PaperEmpirical study on the relationship between developer’s working habits and efficiency (2018)
There’s plenty of evidence that suggests that working long or late hours is neither good for you nor your productivity, but that doesn’t stop most developers from doing it anyway. Rodriguez, Tanaka, and Kamei analysed the actual working habits of software developers and the effect that these habits have on their efficiency.