Behavioral economics in software quality engineering

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.