The Influence of Cognitive Biases on Architectural Technical Debt

Cognitive biases exert a significant influence on human thinking and decision-making. In order to identify how they influence the occurrence of architectural technical debt, a series of semi-structured interviews with software architects was performed. The results show which classes of architectural technical debt originate from cognitive biases, and reveal the antecedents of technical debt items (classes) through biases. This way, we analysed how and when cognitive biases lead to the creation of technical debt. We also identified a set of debiasing techniques that can be used in order to prevent the negative influence of cognitive biases. The observations of the role of organisational culture in the avoidance of inadvertent technical debt throw a new light on that issue.Comment: Presented at 2021 IEEE 18th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) 202

What rationales drive architectural decisions? An empirical inquiry

Architectural decision-making is a crucial concern for researchers and practitioners alike. There is a rationale behind every architectural decision that motivates an architect to choose one architectural solution out of a set of options. This study aims to identify which categories of rationale most frequently impact architectural decisions and investigates why these are important to practitioners. Our research comprises two steps of empirical inquiry: a questionnaire (63 participants) and 13 interviews. As a result, we obtained a set of rationales that motivated architects' decisions in practice. Out of them, we extracted a list of software quality attributes that practitioners were the most concerned about. We found that, overall, architects prefer to choose solutions which are familiar to them or that guarantee fast software implementation. Mid-career architects (5 to 15 years of experience) are more open to new solutions than senior and junior practitioners. Additionally, we found that most practitioners are not concerned about the quality attributes of compatibility and portability due to modern software development practices, such as the prevalence of using specific standards and virtualisation/containerization