Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study

TL;DR

This systematic mapping study reviews the literature on cognitive biases in software engineering, highlighting the current state of research, gaps in mitigation strategies, and the need for stronger theoretical foundations to address human errors in software projects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive synthesis of existing research on cognitive biases in SE, identifying gaps and guiding future work on mitigation and theory development.

Findings

Identified 37 cognitive biases studied in 65 articles from 1990 to 2016.

Research on mitigation techniques is scarce despite increasing interest.

Theoretical foundations for understanding biases are weak and need strengthening.

Abstract

One source of software project challenges and failures is the systematic errors introduced by human cognitive biases. Although extensively explored in cognitive psychology, investigations concerning cognitive biases have only recently gained popularity in software engineering (SE) research. This paper therefore systematically maps, aggregates and synthesizes the literature on cognitive biases in software engineering to generate a comprehensive body of knowledge, understand state of the art research and provide guidelines for future research and practise. Focusing on bias antecedents, effects and mitigation techniques, we identified 65 articles, which investigate 37 cognitive biases, published between 1990 and 2016. Despite strong and increasing interest, the results reveal a scarcity of research on mitigation techniques and poor theoretical foundations in understanding and interpreting cognitive biases. Although bias-related research has generated many new insights in the software engineering community, specific bias mitigation techniques are still needed for software professionals to overcome the deleterious effects of cognitive biases on their work.