The Toilet Paper

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

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.

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

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.

Construction worker pretends to check the work of his colleague

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

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

Traditional reporter rides a disgruntled data unicorn

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

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

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

Evaluating ontological decisions with OntoClean

A look at domain modelling from an academic perspective.

Are static analysis violations really fixed?

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

Google has the tendency to send people to the left

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.

Automating chaos experiments in production

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

Suspicious van that promises free candy to children

Understanding children’s perception of privacy risks online

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

Two planning poker participants have made the same estimates

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.