Cognitive Biases in Software Quality and Testing

Humans are an integral entity for performing software quality and testing activities. The quality is compromised when human- thought process deviates from the laws of rational thinking, referred to as cognitive biases. The work carried out so far from this perspective in software quality and testing is very scarce and is limited to one cognitive bias only. This work aims to explore the phenomenon of cognitive biases in software quality and testing in more detail. Furthermore, investigating the factors that exist in an organisational context and that trigger the biases, which in turn deteriorate the quality of software, is also the focus of this work. Acquiring the knowledge of cognitive biases and the triggering factors will help in circumventing them, thus improving software quality.