Behavioral Software Engineering
summary
Covers how documented cognitive biases map to everyday engineering choices and gives actionable countermeasures: patternicity (benchmarks showing a spurious 3% “speedup” that’s noise), the anchoring effect (first bug severity sets the team anchor), and the sunk cost fallacy (breeding cobras and keeping failing projects). Recommends measurable experiments, independent estimates then group discussion, ranges instead of single numbers, fast prototyping/dogfooding, rotating devil’s-advocate roles, and routine refactor time to make future costs visible.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Behavioral software engineering intro
- 1:38Market hypothesis and cognitive biases
- 4:16Patternicity and spurious correlations
- 8:59Benchmarking pitfalls and placebo effects
- 12:30Cobra effect and metrics incentives
- 13:55Anchoring in bug severity
- 18:34Sunk cost and technical debt
- 21:07Failing fast and dogfooding
- 22:56Hyperbolic discounting and maintainability
- 27:40Habits and tooling resistance
- 30:58Semmelweis and confirmation bias
- 34:40Documenting decisions and re-evaluation
- 35:23Framing effect and loss aversion
- 40:30Evolutionary roots of biases
- 43:03Conclusion and continuous learning
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