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Software designers, are you biased?

Published: 24 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Methods of representing and capturing design rationale have been studied in past years. Many meta-models, methods and techniques have been proposed. Are these software engineering methods sufficient to help designers make logical and appropriate design decisions? Studies have shown that people make biased decisions, software designers may also be subjected to such cognitive biases. In this paper, I give an overview of how cognitive biases and reasoning failures may lead to unsound design decisions. I conjecture that in order to improve the overall quality of software design, we as a community need to improve our understanding and teaching of software design reasoning.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SHARK '11: Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on SHAring and Reusing Architectural Knowledge
May 2011
62 pages
ISBN:9781450305969
DOI:10.1145/1988676
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 May 2011

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Author Tags

  1. cognitive bias
  2. decisions
  3. reasoning
  4. software design

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ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering
May 24, 2011
HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

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  • (2023)Fixations in Agile Software Development TeamsFoundations of Computing and Decision Sciences10.2478/fcds-2023-000148:1(3-18)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023
  • (2022)How Templated Requirements Specifications Inhibit Creativity in Software EngineeringIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.311250348:10(4074-4086)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
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