TY - GEN
T1 - Temporal Discounting in Software Engineering
T2 - 13th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2019
AU - Fagerholm, Fabian
AU - Becker, Christoph
AU - Chatzigeorgiou, Alexander
AU - Betz, Stefanie
AU - Duboc, Leticia
AU - Penzenstadler, Birgit
AU - Mohanani, Rahul
AU - Venters, Colin C.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was partially supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council through RGPIN-2016-06640, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Research Fund, and the KKS Foundation through the S.E.R.T. Research Profile at Blekinge Institute of Technology. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 712949 (TECNIOspring PLUS) and from the Agency for Business Competitiveness of the Government of Catalonia.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/9
Y1 - 2019/9
N2 - Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit. However, how software professionals make intertemporal decisions is not well understood. Aim: This paper investigates how shifting time frames influence preferences in software projects in relation to purposefully selected background factors. Method: We investigate temporal discounting by replicating a questionnaire-based observational study. The replication uses a changed-population and -experimenter design to increase the internal and external validity of the original results. Results: The results of this study confirm the occurrence of temporal discounting in samples of both professional and student participants from different countries and demonstrate strong variance in discounting between study participants. We found that professional experience influenced discounting. Participants with broader professional experience exhibited less discounting than those with narrower experience. Conclusions: The results provide strong empirical support for the relevance and importance of temporal discounting in SE and the urgency of targeted interdisciplinary research to explore the underlying mechanisms and their theoretical and practical implications. The results suggest that technical debt management could be improved by increasing the breadth of experience available for critical decisions with long-term impact. In addition, the present study provides a methodological basis for replicating temporal discounting studies in software engineering.
AB - Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit. However, how software professionals make intertemporal decisions is not well understood. Aim: This paper investigates how shifting time frames influence preferences in software projects in relation to purposefully selected background factors. Method: We investigate temporal discounting by replicating a questionnaire-based observational study. The replication uses a changed-population and -experimenter design to increase the internal and external validity of the original results. Results: The results of this study confirm the occurrence of temporal discounting in samples of both professional and student participants from different countries and demonstrate strong variance in discounting between study participants. We found that professional experience influenced discounting. Participants with broader professional experience exhibited less discounting than those with narrower experience. Conclusions: The results provide strong empirical support for the relevance and importance of temporal discounting in SE and the urgency of targeted interdisciplinary research to explore the underlying mechanisms and their theoretical and practical implications. The results suggest that technical debt management could be improved by increasing the breadth of experience available for critical decisions with long-term impact. In addition, the present study provides a methodological basis for replicating temporal discounting studies in software engineering.
KW - behavioral software engineering
KW - decision making
KW - intertemporal choice
KW - judgment
KW - psychology
KW - questionnaire
KW - technical debt
KW - technical debt management
KW - temporal discounting
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074281382&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870161
DO - 10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870161
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85074281382
T3 - International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
BT - Proceedings - 13th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2019
PB - IEEE Computer Society
Y2 - 19 September 2019 through 20 September 2019
ER -