An Experimental Evaluation of a De-biasing Intervention for Professional Software Developers
Martin Shepperd, Carolyn Mair, Magne J{\o}rgensen

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that increasing software developers' awareness of cognitive biases can significantly reduce the anchoring bias in productivity estimates, highlighting the value of de-biasing training.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence that awareness workshops can mitigate anchoring bias among software developers, a novel application in software engineering context.
Findings
Anchoring bias has a large effect on productivity estimates.
Awareness training reduces the bias effect by approximately 40%.
De-biasing training also triples the reduction in estimate variance.
Abstract
CONTEXT: The role of expert judgement is essential in our quest to improve software project planning and execution. However, its accuracy is dependent on many factors, not least the avoidance of judgement biases, such as the anchoring bias, arising from being influenced by initial information, even when it's misleading or irrelevant. This strong effect is widely documented. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to replicate this anchoring bias using professionals and, novel in a software engineering context, explore de-biasing interventions through increasing knowledge and awareness of judgement biases. METHOD: We ran two series of experiments in company settings with a total of 410 software developers. Some developers took part in a workshop to heighten their awareness of a range of cognitive biases, including anchoring. Later, the anchoring bias was induced by presenting low or high productivity…
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