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?
“Heap, Heap, Array!”
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?
When and how to JOIN a table with itself
Relational databases make it very easy to join data from different tables, but did you know you can also JOIN data within the same table?
How do you number SELECT query results using SQL?
Want to let number or rank your query results? Let your database do the hard work for you.
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.
How to run PHPUnit tests in PhpStorm
A tutorial for people who keep forgetting how to run PHPUnit tests using PhpStorm.
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.
MDX: The good, the bad, and the ugly
If you have your own blog and like the simplicity of Markdown, but don’t want to give up JSX, you may want to give MDX a try.
When testing meets code review: Why and how developers review tests
Why do developers find it so hard to review test code?
Are static analysis violations really fixed?
Static analysis tools are often used to find inconsistencies and possible bugs in code. But what happens next?
Allonsay’s language classification algorithm
How you can detect the language of texts, without using the “ML” word.
Finding the most common words in a set of texts for a word cloud
Alternatively: why word counting is nothing like bean counting.
(Not) looping over lists in PHP
This post discusses three common array functions: map, reduce, and filter.
Scalable transfer patterns
Path finding algorithms for public transport take a little bit more work to get right than those for private transport.
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.
Migrating to GraphQL: A practical assessment
Facebook’s GraphQL looks very promising, but is it ready for primetime?
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.
How do design decisions affect the distribution of software metrics?
The authors of this week’s paper built a tool that can infer the design role of classes and let it analyse some Java projects.
Does it really matter to test-first or to test-last?
Debunking some myths about the effectiveness of test-driven development.
I’m leaving you, Travis: A continuous integration breakup story
What makes people abandon their continuous integration service?