The Influence of Cognitive Biases on Architectural Technical Debt

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cognitive biases influence the creation of architectural technical debt through interviews with architects, identifying biases' roles and proposing debiasing techniques to mitigate negative effects.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis linking cognitive biases to architectural technical debt and introduces debiasing strategies to prevent such debt.

Findings

Certain cognitive biases directly lead to specific types of technical debt.

Organizational culture impacts the likelihood of incurring technical debt due to biases.

Debiasing techniques can effectively reduce the influence of biases on architectural decisions.

Abstract

Cognitive biases exert a significant influence on human thinking and decision-making. In order to identify how they influence the occurrence of architectural technical debt, a series of semi-structured interviews with software architects was performed. The results show which classes of architectural technical debt originate from cognitive biases, and reveal the antecedents of technical debt items (classes) through biases. This way, we analysed how and when cognitive biases lead to the creation of technical debt. We also identified a set of debiasing techniques that can be used in order to prevent the negative influence of cognitive biases. The observations of the role of organisational culture in the avoidance of inadvertent technical debt throw a new light on that issue.