The Shape of Code

It has been just over two years since I release the first draft of the Human cognitive characteristics chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book. As new material was discovered, it got added where it seemed to belong (at the time), no effort was invested in maintaining any degree of coherence.

The plan was to find enough material to paint a coherence picture of the impact of human cognitive characteristics on software engineering. In practice, finishing the book in a reasonable time-frame requires that I stop looking for new material (assuming it exists), and go with what is currently available. There are a few datasets that have been promised, and having these would help fill some holes in the later sections.

The material has been reorganized into what is essentially a pass over what I think are the major issues, discussed via studies for which I have data (the rule of requiring data for a topic to be discussed, gets bent out of shape the most in this chapter), presented in almost a bullet point-like style. At least there are plenty of figures for people to look at, and they are in color.

I think the material will convince readers that human cognition is a crucial topic in software development; download the draft pdf.

Model building by cognitive psychologists is starting to become popular, with probabilistic languages, such as JAGS and Stan, becoming widely used. I was hoping to build models like this for software engineering tasks, but it would have taken too much time, and will have to wait until the book is done.

As always, if you know of any interesting software engineering data, please let me know.

Next, the cognitive capitalism chapter.