Cognitive Bias and Software Development

[jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca]

This reference was chopped from the bottom of a previous message.
 
Communications of the ACM issue on Cognition and Software Development
 
"Developers' thought processes are a fundamental area of concern. Cognitive
scientists have discovered that people's intuitive inferences and probability
judgments do not strictly conform to the laws of logic or mathematics, and that
people are willing to provide plausible explanations for random events. This
article examines the role these phenomenon might have in software development,
ultimately concluding that what are cast as one-sided software development
guidelines can be recast beneficially as two-sided trade-offs"
 
Cognitive Bias in Software Engineering
Webb Stacy and Jean MacMillian
Communications of the ACM
June 1995/Vol 38, No. 6
 
The article contains several good example of various classes of bias, including
the representativeness, availability and confirmatory bias. While the article
specifically adresses issues within the context of software development, all of
these biases are general in nature and have correlates in other fields.
 
Ciao,
James
 
Great minds think alike. Fools seldom differ. - Anonymous