Title
Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study
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 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 (published between 1990 and 2016), which investigate 37 cognitive biases. 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TSE.2018.2877759
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Antecedents of cognitive bias,cognitive bias,debiasing,effects of cognitive bias,software engineering,systematic mapping
Journal
46
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
12
0098-5589
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rahul Mohanani1172.77
Iflaah Salman2703.34
Burak Turhan3557.54
Pilar Rodríguez417313.56
Paul Ralph510216.19