A Systematic Literature Review on Intertemporal Choice in Software Engineering - Protocol and Results
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paper_title: Rational choice and the framing of decisions

paper_content:

Alternative descriptions of a decision problem often give rise to different preferences, contrary to the principle of invariance that underlines the rational theory of choice. Violations of this theory are traced to the rules that govern the framing of decision and to the psychological principles of evaluation embodied in prospect theory. Invariance and dominance are obeyed when their application is transparent and often violated in other situations. Because these rules are normatively essential but descriptively invalid, no theory of choice can be both normatively adequate and descriptively accurate.
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paper_title: Towards a behavioral software engineering

paper_content:

Throughout the history of Software Engineering (SE) it has been repeatedly found that the humans involved, i.e. the engineers and developers in addition to other stakeholders, are a key factor in determining project outcomes and success. However, the amount of research that focuses on human aspects has been limited compared to research with technology or process focus. With increasing maturity of the field, interest in agile methods and a growing dissatisfaction with the continued challenges of developing high-quality software on time, the amount of SE research putting human aspect in primary focus has increased. In this paper we argue that a synthesized view of the emerging human-focused SE research is needed and can add value through giving focus, direction and help identify gaps. Taking cues from the addition of Behavioral Economics as an important part of the area of Economics we propose the term Behavioral Software Engineering (BSE) as an umbrella concept for research that focus on behavioral and social aspects in the work activities of software engineers. We propose that a model based on three units of analysis can give structure and point to concepts that are important for BSE. To add detail to this model we are conducting a systematic review to map out what is currently known. To exemplify the model and the area we here present the results from a subset of the identified concepts.
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paper_title: Requirements: The Key to Sustainability

paper_content:

Software's critical role in society demands a paradigm shift in the software engineering mind-set. This shift's focus begins in requirements engineering. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of Software Engineering.
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paper_title: Behavioral Software Engineering : a Definition and Systematic Literature Review

paper_content:

Throughout the history of software engineering, the human aspects have repeatedly been recognized as important. Even though research that investigates them has been growing in the past decade, these aspects should be more generally considered.The main objective of this study is to clarify the research area concerned with human aspects of software engineering and to create a common platform for future research. In order to meet the objective, we propose a definition of the research area behavioral software engineering (BSE) and present results from a systematic literature review based on the definition.The result indicates that there are knowledge gaps in the research area of behavioral software engineering and that earlier research has been focused on a few concepts, which have been applied to a limited number of software engineering areas. The individual studies have typically had a narrow perspective focusing on few concepts from a single unit of analysis. Further, the research has rarely been conducted in collaboration by researchers from both software engineering and social science.Altogether, this review can help put a broader set of human aspects higher on the agenda for future software engineering research and practice. We present behavioral SE (BSE) and a systematic literature review.Result shows gaps in existing research; it has focused on only a few BSE concepts.BSE studies rarely consider multiple levels and focus on only a few concepts.Even though a majority of BSE research is empirical, few papers are experiments.This paper can help put a broader set of human aspects higher on the agenda.
---
paper_title: Behavioral economics in software quality engineering

paper_content:

This article describes empirical research results regarding the "history effect" in software quality evaluation processes. Most software quality models and evaluation processes models assume that software quality may be deterministically evaluated, especially when it is evaluated by experts. Consequently, software developers focus on the technical characteristics of the software product. A similar assumption is common in most engineering disciplines. However, in regard to other kinds of goods, direct violations of the assumption about objective evaluation were shown to be affected by the consequences of cognitive processes limitations. Ongoing discussion in the area of behavioral economics raises the question: are the experts prone to observation biases? If they are, then software quality models overlook an important aspect of software quality evaluation. This article proposes an experiment that aims to trace the influence of users' knowledge on software quality assessment. Measuring the influence of single variables for the software quality perception process is a complex task. There is no valid quality model for the precise measurement of product quality, and consequently software engineering does not have tools to freely manipulate the quality level for a product. This article proposes a simplified method to manipulate the observed quality level, thereby making it possible to conduct research. The proposed experiment has been conducted among professional software evaluators. The results show the significant negative influence (large effect size) of negative experience of users on final opinion about software quality regardless of its actual level.
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paper_title: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

paper_content:

Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision-making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. Since 1985, Klein has conducted fieldwork to find out how people tackle challenges in difficult, nonroutine situations. Sources of Power is based on observations of humans acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. In addition to providing information that can be used by professionals in management, psychology, engineering, and other fields, the book presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks.
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paper_title: Sustainability Debt: A Metaphor to Support Sustainability Design Decisions

paper_content:

Sustainability, the capacity to endure, is fundamental for the societies on our planet. Despite its increasing recognition in software engineering, it remains difficult to assess the delayed systemic effects of decisions taken in requirements engineering and systems design. To support this difficult task, this paper introduces the concept of sustainability debt. The metaphor helps in the discovery, documentation, and communication of sustainability issues in requirements engineering. We build on the existing metaphor of technical debt and extend it to four other dimensions of sustainability to help think about sustainability-aware software systems engineering. We highlight the meaning of debt in each dimension and the relationships between those dimensions. Finally, we discuss the use of the metaphor and explore how it can help us to design sustainability-aware software intensive systems.
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paper_title: Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review

paper_content:

This paper discusses the discounted utility (DU) model: its historical development, underlying assumptions, and "anomalies" - the empirical regularities that are inconsistent with its theoretical predictions. We then summarize the alternate theoretical formulations that have been advanced to address these anomalies. We also review three decades of empirical research on intertemporal choice, and discuss reasons for the spectacular variation in implicit discount rates across studies. Throughout the paper, we stress the importance of distinguishing time preference, per se, from many other considerations that also influence intertemporal choices.
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paper_title: Theory of Games and Economic Behavior

paper_content:

This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began more than sixty years ago as a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, in 1944, when Princeton University Press published "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior." In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences.
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paper_title: Safety, Security, Now Sustainability: The Nonfunctional Requirement for the 21st Century

paper_content:

Many software systems today control large-scale sociotechnical systems. These systems aren't just entangled with the environment but also with our dwindling resources and mostly unsustainable way of living, while the planet's population continues to grow. Dealing with sustainability requirements and systematically supporting their elicitation, analysis, and realization is a problem that has yet to be solved. Decades ago, the discipline of software engineering dealt with similar shortcomings in its processes by including safety and security as new system qualities. In light of the increasing consequences of inadequately addressing sustainability in developing software systems, software engineers must apply the lessons learned from these prior research efforts and identify the necessary research agenda. Considering sustainability in software engineering means more than energy efficiency and green IT, which are concerned with the first-order impacts of software systems. Software engineers must also take into account the second- and third-order impacts in the system context, even if they're hard to assess. By doing so, engineers have the potential to considerably improve civilization's sustainability. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/VC07j6a1XUw is a video in which author Birgit Penzenstadler talks about how software engineers can considerably improve civilization's sustainability by taking into account not just the first-order impacts of software systems but also their second- and third-order impacts.
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paper_title: Decisions with Multiple Objectives: Preferences and Value Trade-Offs

paper_content:

Many of the complex problems faced by decision makers involve multiple conflicting objectives. This book describes how a confused decision maker, who wishes to make a reasonable and responsible choice among alternatives, can systematically probe his true feelings in order to make those critically important, vexing trade-offs between incommensurable objectives. The theory is illustrated by many real concrete examples taken from a host of disciplinary settings. The standard approach in decision theory or decision analysis specifies a simplified single objective like monetary return to maximise. By generalising from the single objective case to the multiple objective case, this book considerably widens the range of applicability of decision analysis.
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paper_title: The foresight saga, redux

paper_content:

Short-term thinking is the enemy of the long-term future.
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paper_title: The Blackwell encyclopedia of management

paper_content:

Professor Cooper is the Editor-in-Chief of the international scholarly Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management
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paper_title: Measure it? Manage it? Ignore it? software practitioners and technical debt

paper_content:

The technical debt metaphor is widely used to encapsulate numerous software quality problems. The metaphor is attractive to practitioners as it communicates to both technical and nontechnical audiences that if quality problems are not addressed, things may get worse. However, it is unclear whether there are practices that move this metaphor beyond a mere communication mechanism. Existing studies of technical debt have largely focused on code metrics and small surveys of developers. In this paper, we report on our survey of 1,831 participants, primarily software engineers and architects working in long-lived, software-intensive projects from three large organizations, and follow-up interviews of seven software engineers. We analyzed our data using both nonparametric statistics and qualitative text analysis. We found that architectural decisions are the most important source of technical debt. Furthermore, while respondents believe the metaphor is itself important for communication, existing tools are not currently helpful in managing the details. We use our results to motivate a technical debt timeline to focus management and tooling approaches.
---
paper_title: Towards a behavioral software engineering

paper_content:

Throughout the history of Software Engineering (SE) it has been repeatedly found that the humans involved, i.e. the engineers and developers in addition to other stakeholders, are a key factor in determining project outcomes and success. However, the amount of research that focuses on human aspects has been limited compared to research with technology or process focus. With increasing maturity of the field, interest in agile methods and a growing dissatisfaction with the continued challenges of developing high-quality software on time, the amount of SE research putting human aspect in primary focus has increased. In this paper we argue that a synthesized view of the emerging human-focused SE research is needed and can add value through giving focus, direction and help identify gaps. Taking cues from the addition of Behavioral Economics as an important part of the area of Economics we propose the term Behavioral Software Engineering (BSE) as an umbrella concept for research that focus on behavioral and social aspects in the work activities of software engineers. We propose that a model based on three units of analysis can give structure and point to concepts that are important for BSE. To add detail to this model we are conducting a systematic review to map out what is currently known. To exemplify the model and the area we here present the results from a subset of the identified concepts.
---
paper_title: The Blackwell encyclopedia of management

paper_content:

Professor Cooper is the Editor-in-Chief of the international scholarly Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management
---
paper_title: Decisions with Multiple Objectives: Preferences and Value Trade-Offs

paper_content:

Many of the complex problems faced by decision makers involve multiple conflicting objectives. This book describes how a confused decision maker, who wishes to make a reasonable and responsible choice among alternatives, can systematically probe his true feelings in order to make those critically important, vexing trade-offs between incommensurable objectives. The theory is illustrated by many real concrete examples taken from a host of disciplinary settings. The standard approach in decision theory or decision analysis specifies a simplified single objective like monetary return to maximise. By generalising from the single objective case to the multiple objective case, this book considerably widens the range of applicability of decision analysis.
---
paper_title: A model of design decision making based on empirical results of interviews with software designers

paper_content:

Despite the impact of design decisions on software design, we have little understanding about how design decisions are made. This hinders our ability to provide design metrics, processes and training that support inherent design work. By interviewing 25 software designers and using content analysis and explanation building as our analysis technique, we provide qualitative and quantitative results that highlight aspects of rational and naturalistic decision making in software design. Our qualitative multi-case study results in a model of design decision making to answer the question: how do software designers make design decisions? We find the structure of the design problem determines the aspects of rational and naturalistic decision making used. The more structured the design decision, the less a designer considers options.
---
paper_title: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

paper_content:

Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision-making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. Since 1985, Klein has conducted fieldwork to find out how people tackle challenges in difficult, nonroutine situations. Sources of Power is based on observations of humans acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. In addition to providing information that can be used by professionals in management, psychology, engineering, and other fields, the book presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks.
---
paper_title: Behavioral Software Engineering : a Definition and Systematic Literature Review

paper_content:

Throughout the history of software engineering, the human aspects have repeatedly been recognized as important. Even though research that investigates them has been growing in the past decade, these aspects should be more generally considered.The main objective of this study is to clarify the research area concerned with human aspects of software engineering and to create a common platform for future research. In order to meet the objective, we propose a definition of the research area behavioral software engineering (BSE) and present results from a systematic literature review based on the definition.The result indicates that there are knowledge gaps in the research area of behavioral software engineering and that earlier research has been focused on a few concepts, which have been applied to a limited number of software engineering areas. The individual studies have typically had a narrow perspective focusing on few concepts from a single unit of analysis. Further, the research has rarely been conducted in collaboration by researchers from both software engineering and social science.Altogether, this review can help put a broader set of human aspects higher on the agenda for future software engineering research and practice. We present behavioral SE (BSE) and a systematic literature review.Result shows gaps in existing research; it has focused on only a few BSE concepts.BSE studies rarely consider multiple levels and focus on only a few concepts.Even though a majority of BSE research is empirical, few papers are experiments.This paper can help put a broader set of human aspects higher on the agenda.
---
paper_title: Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review

paper_content:

This paper discusses the discounted utility (DU) model: its historical development, underlying assumptions, and "anomalies" - the empirical regularities that are inconsistent with its theoretical predictions. We then summarize the alternate theoretical formulations that have been advanced to address these anomalies. We also review three decades of empirical research on intertemporal choice, and discuss reasons for the spectacular variation in implicit discount rates across studies. Throughout the paper, we stress the importance of distinguishing time preference, per se, from many other considerations that also influence intertemporal choices.
---

Title: A Systematic Literature Review on Intertemporal Choice in Software Engineering - Protocol and Results

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: Discuss the importance of software-intensive systems and the need to understand intertemporal choices in software engineering.

Section 2: Objective
Description 2: Explain the motivations and objectives of the systematic literature review on intertemporal choices in software engineering.

Section 3: Contribution
Description 3: Outline the main contributions and expected outcomes of this review.

Section 4: Research Questions
Description 4: List and elaborate on the specific research questions guiding this review.

Section 5: Roles and Responsibilities
Description 5: Detail the members involved in the review process and their respective roles and responsibilities.

Section 6: Search Strategy
Description 6: Describe the search strategy, including information sources, preliminary searches, concept reviews, and final search strings.

Section 7: Selection Criteria
Description 7: Define the inclusion and exclusion criteria used to select relevant papers for the review.

Section 8: Selection Procedures
Description 8: Explain the procedures used to screen and select papers for inclusion in the study.

Section 9: Analysis
Description 9: Illustrate the methods and processes used to analyze the selected papers.

Section 10: RESULTS
Description 10: Summarize the statistics and findings from the search results and the analysis of selected papers.

Section 11: FINDINGS
Description 11: Discuss the key findings related to the research questions, including specific insights on empirical research, dimensions considered, the role of time, and assumptions on decision making.

Section 12: Discussion
Description 12: Reflect on the broader implications of the findings and how they align with existing theories and practices.

Section 13: Threats to Validity
Description 13: Identify potential threats to the validity of the review and how they were addressed.

Section 14: Future work
Description 14: Suggest directions for future research based on the findings of this review.

Section 15: APPENDIX A PRETEST SEARCH STRINGS
Description 15: Provide details of the pretest search strings used during the preliminary searches.