The Toilet Paper

Summaries of scientific papers without the boring sciencey bits. Ideal for bathroom and other types of breaks.

Link from the Zelda series points at a pot that he’s about to break.

What happened to the Semantic Web?

2021 is not the year of the Linux desktop, nor is it the year of the Semantic Web. But as a field of research it is still alive and kicking.

Do Java developers write better Python? Studying off-language code quality on GitHub

What happens when you let Java and C++ developers write Python code?

“The March of Progress”, documenting the evolution from “No homo” to “Homo sapiens”

Does code structure affect comprehension? On using and naming intermediate variables

The answer is not “yes” or “no”, but somewhere in between. Who would’ve guessed?

What it would take to use mutation testing in industry – A study at Facebook

Mutation testing is useful, but not many developers use it. What steps can we take to increase adoption?

A weighted companion cube in Windows colours

Towards inclusive software engineering through A/B testing: A case-study at Windows

Data collected from users helps you make better product and design decisions – but only if you gather and interpret it correctly.

An old man tries to read his newspaper, but is struggling because of his poor eyesight.

Towards an improved methodology for automated readability prediction

Some texts are easier to read than others. There are many different formulas that supposedly quantify “readability”, but how useful are they?

A classical building dedicated to the poop emoji

Water, toilets and public health in the Roman era

I’ve been feeling like shit for a while now, so this seems like a good moment to feature an article about literal shit.

Response option configuration of online administered Likert scales

What should your Likert scales look like?

Investigating the temporal relationship between proactive burnout prevention and burnout

How feasible is it for an employee to proactively prevent or recover from burnout?

A case analysis of enabling continuous software deployment through knowledge management

A paper with a vague title, but also clear lessons about adoption of DevOps practices in a medium-sized software company.

Depiction of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union

Résumé-driven development: A definition and empirical characterization

Using the latest tech is a bit like smoking in the ’80s: it makes you look cool, but it might not be the smartest thing to do.

A replicable comparison study of NER software: StanfordNLP, NLTK, OpenNLP, SpaCy, GATE

Named entity recognition (NER) can be used to detect entities like people and locations in text. Which OSS library gives you the best results?

The Docker whale in Twitter’s classic fail whale image

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.

A new king stands on top of his dead predecessor

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.

Batman’s bat signal is visible in the sky

Inter-team coordination mechanisms in large-scale agile

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

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

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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

“That’s beyond the scope of this paper”

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

Crowdsourcing in computing education research: Case Amazon MTurk

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

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

Measuring programming experience

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

Ruler that tells you how much your code sucks using emojis

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.

Face-masked pirate with a selfie stick boards a ship

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.