Cognitive bias in software engineering

Stacy, Webb; MacMillan, Jean

doi:10.1145/203241.203256

Cited by 113 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…In [29], Stacy and MacMillian emphasize the fact that the thought processes of developers are a fundamental concern in software development. To the best of our knowledge, Stacy and MacMillian are the two pioneers who recognized the potential effects of cognitive biases on software engineering.…”

Section: Effects Of Cognitive Biases On Software Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, testing correctness of conditional statements in the source code during white box testing also requires logical reasoning skills. In order to explain the analogy between Wason's Selection Task and white box testing, we extend the example given by Stacy and MacMiilian in [29] as follows: Suppose a developer wants to make sure that every instance of a class named "Controller" has been initialized throughout his/her code. Hence, in unit testing, the developer will perform a test that can be thought as checking the validity 9 of the following hypothesis: "If an instance's class is Controller, then it has been initialized".…”

Section: Wason's Selection Task In Relation Tomentioning

confidence: 99%

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Influence of confirmation biases of developers on software quality: an empirical study

Çalıklı

Bener

2012

Software Qual J

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The thought processes of people have a significant impact on software quality, as software is designed, developed and tested by people. Cognitive biases, which are defined as deviations of human mind from the laws of logic and mathematics, are likely to cause software defects. However, there is little empirical evidence to date to substantiate this assertion. In this research, we focus on a specific cognitive bias type called confirmation bias, which is defined as the tendency of people to seek for evidence to verify hypotheses rather than seeking for evidence to falsify them. Due to confirmation bias, developers might perform unit tests to make their program work rather than to break. Hence, confirmation bias is believed to be one of the factors that lead to increased software defect density. In this research, we present a metric scheme to explore the impact of developers' confirmation bias on software defect density. In order to estimate effectiveness of our metric scheme in quantification of confirmation bias within the context of software development, we performed an empirical study that addressed the prediction of the defective parts of software. In our empirical study, we used confirmation bias metrics on five datasets obtained from two companies. Our results provide empirical evidence that human thought processes and cognitive aspects deserve further investigation to improve decision making in software development for effective process management and resource allocation.

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Section: Effects Of Cognitive Biases On Software Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wason's Selection Task In Relation Tomentioning

confidence: 99%

Influence of confirmation biases of developers on software quality: an empirical study

Çalıklı

Bener

2012

Software Qual J

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“…Furthermore, availability bias arises when multiple pieces of information influence a decision, but only some of them are readily available. This often results in decisions based on incorrect simplifying assumptions that must be reworked later [39].…”

Section: Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software architecture critics in the Argo design environment

Robbins

Redmiles

1998

Knowledge-Based Systems

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“…Anchoring and adjustment; anchoring bias is the initial estimate of solution for any problem of human,adjustment bias is to modify those initial estimates for getting a revised final solution is an appropriate way [5], [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Availability; this bias suggests that human is influenced by information that is easy to recall from dissemination of information in the media or event just happened recently [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting Software Damage Rate from Cognitive Bias in Software Design Process

Chotisarn¹,

Prompoon²

2013

Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Information, Business and Education Technology (ICIBET-2013)

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Software design process is one of the critical processes in software development life cycle since it delivers a software design specification basically used for implementation in order to deliver software meets user expectation. There are many tasks required different skills of design team members. Due to the different backgrounds, experiences and preferences of software designers, cognitive bias may arise that leads tothe increase of software damage. In this paper, we want to explore whether there is a correlation between any cognitive bias types occur from human working process and software damage rate. From our experiment, we discover that there is a statistically significantcorrelation between the two types of cognitive bias; confirmation bias and adjustment bias in design process and software damage rate.

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Cognitive bias in software engineering

Cited by 113 publications

References 6 publications

Influence of confirmation biases of developers on software quality: an empirical study

Influence of confirmation biases of developers on software quality: an empirical study

Software architecture critics in the Argo design environment

Predicting Software Damage Rate from Cognitive Bias in Software Design Process

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