Developer's thought processes are a fundamental area of concern. Cognitive scientist have discovered that people's intiative inferences and probality judgments do not strictly conform to the laws of logic or mathematics, and that people are willing to provide plausible explanations for random events. This article examines the role these phenomena might have in software development, ultimately concluding that what are cast as one-sided software development guidelines often can be recast beneficially as two-sided trade-offs.
Not long ago, programmers controlled computers by arranging wires on a control panel built into the side of a large floor-standing machine. Today palm-sized pointing devices are used to drag and drop visual images on machines smaller than a notebook. Dramatic differences like these make it easy to forget that software development still revolves around the needs of the computer at the expense of the needs of developers and end users.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.