The Role of Egocentric Bias in Undergraduate Agile Software Development Teams

The egocentric bias describes the tendency to value one's own in-put and perspective higher than that of others. This phenomenon impacts collaboration and teamwork. However, current research on the subject concerning modern software development is lacking. We conducted a case study of 26 final year software engineering students and collected the perceptions of individual contributions to team efforts through regular surveys. We report evidence of an egocentric bias in engineering team members, which decreased over time. In contrast, we found no in-group bias, i.e. favoritism regarding contributions of own team members. We discuss our initial analyses and results, which we hypothesize can be explained by group cohesiveness as well as non-competition and group similarity, respectively.