Using a Cognitive Psychology Perspective on Errors to Improve Requirements Quality: An Empirical Investigation

Anu, Vaibhav; Walia, Gursimran Singh; Hu, Wenhua; Carver, Jeffrey C.; Bradshaw, Gary L.

doi:10.1109/issre.2016.41

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Previous work has looked at HET in relation to requirements errors. Anu et al [12] used two taxonomies to understand errors in requirements, the first is Requirements Error Taxonomy (RETa) and the second is Human Error Taxonomy (HETa). The RETa categorises errors at a high level in terms of people (communication), process (elicitation) and documentation (specification) errors.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although Human Error was the theme of a promising 2015 ICSE Workshop 5 there remain few studies of how HET can be used in software development. The few studies that do use HET tend to focus on errors in user requirements [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18] (on which topic another promising one-off workshop occurred in 2017 6 ). One prominent piece of work looking at the use of HET in requirements engineering presents a survey study to understand high level human errors, the related faults and methods of mitigation used by requirements engineers on real projects [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Software Developers Mitigate Their Errors When Developing Code

Nagaria

Hall

2022

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Code remains largely handmade by humans and, as such, writing code is prone to error. Many previous studies have focused on the technical reasons for these errors and provided developers with increasingly sophisticated tools. Few studies have looked in detail at why code errors have been made from a human perspective. We use Human Error Theory to frame our exploratory study and use semi-structured interviews to uncover a preliminary understanding of the errors developers make while coding. We look particularly at the Skill-based (SB) errors reported by 27 professional software developers. We found that the complexity of the development environment is one of the most frequently reported reasons for errors. Maintaining concentration and focus on a particular task also underpins many developer errors. We found that developers struggle with effective mitigation strategies for their errors, reporting strategies largely based on improving their own willpower to concentrate better on coding tasks. We discuss how using Reason's Swiss Cheese model may help reduce errors during software development. This model ensures that layers of tool, process and management mitigation are in place to prevent developer errors from causing system failures.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Software Developers Mitigate Their Errors When Developing Code

Nagaria

Hall

2022

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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“…Based on the cognitive model, a human error taxonomy was proposed for software fault prevention [2]. Another human error taxonomy was recently developed by Anu and Walia et al [11] for with an emphasis on software requirement review. These human error taxonomies vary in details in order to achieve diferent purposes, however, they both place Reason's human error theory [12] as a fundamental theory.…”

Section: Human Error Mechanisms Underlying Software Faultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since the idea of using human error theories to promote software fault detections at various stages of software development lifecycle was presented in 2011 [4], signiicant progress has been made recently [11,21]. Anu and Walia et al [11] developed a human error taxonomy for requirement review, and positive efects on subjects' fault detection efectiveness were observed.…”

Section: Software Fault Detection Based On Human Error Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Human Error Analysis in Software Engineering

Huang¹

2017

Theory and Application on Cognitive Factors and Risk Management - New Trends and Procedures

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As the primary cause of software defects, human error is the key to understanding, detecting and preventing software defects. This chapter irst reviews the state of art of an emerging area: software fault defense based on human error mechanisms. Then, an approach for human error analysis (HEA) is proposed. HEA consists of two important components: human error modes (HEM) and an undated version of causal mechanism graphs (CMGs). Human error modes are the general erroneous paterns that humans tend to behave in a variety of activities. Causal mechanism graph provides a way to extract the error-prone contexts in software development, and link the contexts to general human error modes. HEA can be used at various phases of software development, for both defect detection and prevention purposes. An application case is provided to demonstrate how to use HEA.

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