Decision Bias & Software Design: Why It Matters

Understanding how prejudice & bias can stand between rational design decisions in software development.

Introduction

The Oxford dictionary defines bias as “prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.” Many organizations invest heavily in educating their associates on workplace bias — including biases based on race, creed, religion, sex, disability or age. But those same organizations often overlook the cognitive biases that are present in our daily decision making processes. You may wonder what could possibly go wrong because of this. Let us take our software industry as an example.

In the software industry there is a strong feedback factor to everything we do that helps us innovate on new ideas. The product designer, owners, software architects and developers all try to interpret this feedback, localize them to their scope of work, and derive a solution. Imagine what could go wrong if just one of these participants makes a decision in a biased fashion? If left unaddressed, these decision biases can lead to unforeseen consequences, seeping into how we make decisions in our work, ultimately impacting our customers, and leading to costly repairs and…