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.
The Toilet Paper
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).
What is beautiful is usable
If you have a neckbeard colleague who thinks websites and apps should have ugly spartan user interfaces, show them this paper.
Uncovering architectural design decisions
Poorly documented code can tell you what it does, but not what why. Issue trackers can help you rediscover that “why”.
Studying the impact of adopting continuous integration on the delivery time of pull requests
Continuous integration should make everything faster, but it can actually slow things down too.
Exploring ScrumBut – An empirical study of Scrum anti-patterns
Of course you use Scrum – everyone does! But…
Cross-cultural web usability model
Make sure your website doesn’t look or behave like a lost tourist.
Teamwork quality and project success in software development: A survey of agile development teams
Answers to all the questions you never had about teams.