[65778] in Cypherpunks
Cognitive Bias and Software Development
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca)
Wed Sep 18 10:18:07 1996
From: jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 96 09:43:36 EST
To: Black Unicorn <unicorn@schloss.li>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
This reference was chopped from the bottom of a previous message.
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Communications of the ACM issue on Cognition and Software Development
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"Developers' thought processes are a fundamental area of concern. Cognitive
scientists have discovered that people's intuitive inferences and probabili=
ty
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 developme=
nt,
ultimately concluding that what are cast as one-sided software development
guidelines can be recast beneficially as two-sided trade-offs"
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Cognitive Bias in Software Engineering
Webb Stacy and Jean MacMillian
Communications of the ACM
June 1995/Vol 38, No. 6
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The article contains several good example of various classes of bias, inclu=
ding
the representativeness, availability and confirmatory bias. While the artic=
le
specifically adresses issues within the context of software development, al=
l of
these biases are general in nature and have correlates in other fields.
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Ciao,
James
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Great minds think alike. Fools seldom differ. - Anonymous
