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.
The Toilet Paper
“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?
Measuring programming experience
Studies about programming often need to control for programming experience. What’s the best way to do that?
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.
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.
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.
When testing meets code review: Why and how developers review tests
Why do developers find it so hard to review test code?
Finding the data unicorn: A hierarchy of hybridity in data and computational journalism
How is data journalism treated in Canada’s legacy news organisations?
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?
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.
Understanding children’s perception of privacy risks online
The Internet can be a dangerous place. Do children understand this?
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.
Negative results for software effort estimation
The reports of COCOMO’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Scalable transfer patterns
Path finding algorithms for public transport take a little bit more work to get right than those for private transport.
Gender diversity and women in software teams
Tech is largely dominated by men and that’s not good for anyone.
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.
Practitioners’ views on good software testing practices
A look at some best practices for software testing.
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.
Migrating to GraphQL: A practical assessment
Facebook’s GraphQL looks very promising, but is it ready for primetime?
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?
Is beautiful really usable?
This week’s lesson: don’t believe everything you read (or at least try to look for multiple credible sources).