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Cognitive bias in software testing: are you affected?

With the progress of technology, the testing world is developing at a faster speed to ensure "quality at the speed of light".

"continuous integration, digital transformation, lifecycle automation, moving quality to the left to minimize costs" and so on are some magic words that are constantly changing. Although we talk about these issues, the underlying questions-"Why and how to miss defects" continue to be heard and remain unanswered.

At that time, it felt as if the most obvious defect had slipped.

But why?

Although we all want to think that we are very logical, organized and rational, it is regrettable that we are all affected by cognitive bias, which affects the thought process in our daily lives, including our professional work.

Cognitive bias-brief description

According to Wikipedia-"Cognitive bias is a systematic pattern that deviates from norms or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own" subjective social reality "from their views on input.

Individuals' construction of social reality, rather than objective input, may determine their behavior in the social world. Therefore, cognitive bias can sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation or irrationality. "

All right. This is a good definition. But how does it affect thinking and what does it mean for testers in the testing world?

All right! When testers take any test, they are already affected by their own biases-building ideas and judgments based on what they are looking for, where there will be potential defects, who is developing it, the entire history of the program, and so on.

It is very necessary for us to understand the different types of prejudices so that we can more clearly and really want to manage them effectively.

The type of cognitive bias in software testing you are looking for

We need to look for different cognitive biases within ourselves, some of which are explained in detail below

# 1) similar bias

It is easy for human beings to judge the situation according to the similarity of similar situations.

For example, as testers, we often tend to think that Web applications will have similar errors, while client-server applications will have similar error sets.

As testers, we naturally focus on similar errors depending on the nature of the project. Unfortunately, because of this nature, sometimes we tend to miss the most obvious because our thoughts do not allow us to think so.

# 2) congruence bias

This is an act in which our minds refuse to consider alternatives.

This means that testers tend to verify only the expected behavior, so they miss negative verification.

When writing test cases, we tend to cover all requirements with their expected behavior and miss negative traffic, because not all negative traffic is specifically mentioned in the requirements.

They are implicit in the requirements, and it is virtually impossible to record all user behavior.

# 3) confirm deviation

This is the trend to search for and interpret information by confirming our beliefs and assumptions.

Usually, in the testing world, I am sure we will encounter a situation where we think that by default the code of a particular developer will have more defects than other code. so we spend a lot of time testing the modules he develops.

Influenced by these beliefs, you tend to increase the risk of missing defects in modules developed by others.

# 4) the influence of drifting with the current

The act or belief that spreads among people.

When a certain number of people believe in something, it automatically increases the probability that another person believes the same. This happens many times in our daily life.

The most common example is when we buy some products. Instead of our independent choice of products, we usually work with the beliefs of others.

The same behavior is shown in the test world. In our peer group, if some people feel that a particular module is flawless, we unwittingly tend to believe it, and we pay much less attention to the module during verification.

# 5) pay attention to blindness

This is a behavior, and testers, when we are not looking for it, we tend to miss the most obvious defects.

Imagine a situation where you ask a group of people to count in a particular dress color, and you can observe that people are so absorbed in counting them and that they miss seeing anything else important or important around them.

To connect it to the testing world, for example, in an enhancement project where one screen is newly developed, testers are more likely to focus on the newly developed screen and miss other key integrations.

# 6) negative bias

Negative bias is a kind of human tendency to give more psychological weight to bad experiences than good ones.

Where does this enter the testing world? It is difficult to persuade testers to provide signatures for production builds because they only focus on the defects they find.

They don't have time to prove that the product is absolutely defect-free. One of the main reasons for this is that one of the products that decides to launch depends on the product or business manager, although the recommendation will be cited by the test manager.

Conclusion

I hope you can better understand the cognitive bias in software testing, its impact, and what measures can be taken to eliminate the impact?

And an important fact to be aware of is that we turn a blind eye to our own prejudices, while we can recognize the prejudices of others (which is itself a blind spot cognitive bias). But we can be more sober, and to a large extent, we can think more about these issues where we need them.

Do you remember being affected by cognitive bias? Have you noticed cognitive biases in peer groups? Please express your thoughts in the comments section below!

About the author:

This interesting article is written by STH author Geethanjali S-certified Scrum Master and PMP, with more than 18 years of experience in quality assurance and engineering. A transformational leader with extensive experience in leading and providing quality assurance change, global promotion programs, mergers and integration related programs.

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