Relationship between triggers, cognitive biases, and their effectsAbstract
Background: Current state-of-the-art established that cognitive biases appear during code review. They significantly impact the creation of feedback and how developers interpret it. These biases can lead to illogical reasoning and decision-making, violating one of the main hypotheses supporting code review: developers’ accurate and objective code evaluation. Objective: This paper explores harmful cases caused by cognitive biases during code review and potential solutions to avoid such cases or mitigate their effects. Method: We design several prototypes covering confirmation bias and decision fatigue. We rely on a developer-centered design approach by conducting usability tests and validating the prototype with a user experience questionnaire (UEQ) and participants’ feedback. Results: Our interim findings show that some techniques could be implemented in existing code review tools as reviewers will accept them and help prevent behavior detrimental to code review. Conclusion: This work provides a first approach to treating cognitive bias in code review. The developed prototypes will evolve into fully functional tools, with an extensive evaluation with developers.
Xavier Devroey
Professor of Software Engineering
My research goal is to to ease software testing by exploring new paths to achieve a high level of automation for test case design, generation, selection, and prioritization. My main research interests include search-based and model-based software testing, test suite augmentation, DevOps, and variability-intensive systems.
Nicolas Matton
PhD Student
