Research
An annotated collection of 5 books & papers on research, spanning 1967 to 2020. Featuring works by Peter B. Medawar, Craig Larman & Victor R. Basili, David Comer Kidd & Emanuele Castano and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Art of the Soluble
Medawar, a Nobel-winning biologist, argues that good science is not about tackling the hardest problems but about choosing the ones that can actually be solved with the tools available — the art is in the picking. The bo…
Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History
Larman and Basili walk through forty years of software projects that used iterative and incremental development — from Mercury and the early space programme through shuttle avionics to the first large commercial systems…
Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind
Kidd and Castano's experiments show that reading literary fiction — as distinct from popular fiction or nonfiction — measurably improves theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to others. The finding was p…
Do we have a Data Culture?
Kremser and Brunauer sharpen what "data culture" actually means by treating it as a subtype of organisational culture — not a technology stack or a dashboard habit but a set of shared assumptions about how decisions get…
Educating for Empathy in Software Engineering
Levy's paper is part of the small research literature on why empathy should be taught in computer science programmes and what changes when it is. The piece is short, well-referenced, and argues the obvious point carefull…