Software designers, are you biased?

Abstract

Methods of representing and capturing design rationale have been studied in past years. Many meta-models, methods and techniques have been proposed. Are these software engineering methods sufficient to help designers make logical and appropriate design decisions? Studies have shown that people make biased decisions, software designers may also be subjected to such cognitive biases. In this paper, I give an overview of how cognitive biases and reasoning failures may lead to unsound design decisions. I conjecture that in order to improve the overall quality of software design, we as a community need to improve our understanding and teaching of software design reasoning.