Taxonomy-Based Human Error Assessment for Senior Software Engineering Students

Software engineering (SE) is a complex symphony of development activities spanning multiple engineering phases. Despite best efforts, software engineers experience human errors. Human error theory from psychology has been studied in the context of SE, but human error assessment has yet to be adopted as part of typical post-mortem activities in SE. Our goal in this work is to evaluate an existing Taxonomy of Human Errors in Software Engineering (T.H.E.S.E.) as a learning tool for software engineering students. We conducted a user study involving five SE students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). In two experimental phases (17 weeks total), participants self-reported 162 human errors that they experienced during software development. Participants' feedback collected via surveys indicates that T.H.E.S.E. is clear, simple to use, and general to all phases of SE. Participants also indicated that human error assessment guided by T.H.E.S.E. (1) would benefit other students and professional software engineers and (2) enhanced their understanding of human errors in SE and of their own human errors. These are promising results indicating that human error assessment facilitated by T.H.E.S.E. is a valuable learning experience for software engineering students. We release anonymized survey responses and reported human errors. Future work should examine T.H.E.S.E. as a learning tool for professional software developers and examine other SE artifacts to identify categories of human error that are not presently captured by T.H.E.S.E.