Heuristic is a fancy way of saying "rule of thumb" or "educated guess". It's a technique used to solve problems quickly without guaranteeing the optimal solution, which is good enough for most software engineers trying to meet unrealistic deadlines set by clueless product managers.
"I know this code is a mess, but I used a heuristic approach to get it shipped before the arbitrary deadline marketing set based on when Mercury is in retrograde."
"The new AI assistant ChatGPT uses heuristic techniques to generate human-like responses, which is why it sometimes hallucinates answers that sound plausible but are actually nonsense, just like a real software engineer!"
Heuristics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): A deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings and history of heuristics in problem solving and decision making.
Heuristics in Software Engineering (ResearchGate): An academic paper exploring how heuristics are applied in various aspects of software engineering like requirements gathering, design, testing, etc.
Mental Models and Heuristics for Software Engineering (ACM Digital Library): A presentation discussing mental models and heuristics used by experienced software developers to reason about complex systems.
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