Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers’ productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human factors (called human aspects in software engineering research). Among the many skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affective states—emotions and moods—deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers.

https://peerj.com/articles/289/

 

The Impact of Citizen Science

There are half a billion craters on the Moon bigger than about 11 meters (35 feet) across.

That’s a lot. A whole lot. They’re important, though: Most of these craters are billions of years old, and tell us about the history of the Moon. It’s literally laid out before us, if we can puzzle out how to decipher it.

The first step is simply identifying craters, mapping their location and size. That’s a daunting task, but the good folks at Cosmoquest* came up with an interesting solution: let everyone pitch in. They created the Moon Mappers tool, that (after a very brief and simple online training session) allows anyone to dive in and start identifying lunar craters. Images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are displayed, and with a few clicks you can start mapping eons-old asteroid impact events on another world.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/03/16/moon_mappers_citizen_scientists_count_craters_like_the_pros.html

 

Meet Christchurch’s traffic puppet master

The Christchurch Transport Operations Centre looks like something from a spy movie. A wall is covered with eight monitors, each showing a multitude of traffic cameras plus constantly moving graphs and colours.

The centre was launched last July. It is a partnership between Christchurch City Council, NZ Transport Agency and Environment Canterbury, built on cooperation developed in the aftermath of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes.

One of its roles is to provide users of the city’s network of local roads and state highways with up-to-date information about traffic, considered vital given the widespread roadworks under way in the city since the quakes.

Manager Ryan Cooney stands in front of the screens, arms folded, keeping an eye on developments.

Cooney, eyeing the logjam at Chaneys, says traffic is a delicate balance.

Once they intervene they must ensure traffic doesn’t get out of control and back up to the Tram Rd off ramp and into Kaiapoi.

The bus is their way to measure how long people are sitting in the queue. Hammond says four minutes now.

Cooney spots two cars leaving the queue and trying the Kaiapoi off-ramp.

“It’s our suspicion that when they do this and try to come back on at Tram Rd that they actually create more congestion,” he says.

That’s his job – to find little ways of making a big dent in traffic congestion. An extension of a turning lane, like at the corner of Matipo st and Blenheim Rd, will free up the straight-through lane.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/news/9829118/Meet-Christchurchs-traffic-puppet-master

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