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Record W4231932677 · doi:10.1145/1095430.1081761

Anchoring and adjustment in software estimation

2005· article· en· W4231932677 on OpenAlexaff
Jorge Aranda, Steve Easterbrook

Bibliographic record

VenueACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAnchoringEstimatorRespondentEstimationSoftwareComputer scienceEconometricsStatisticsPsychologyMathematicsSocial psychologyEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Anchoring and adjustment is a form of cognitive bias that affects judgments under uncertainty. If given an initial answer, the respondent seems to use this as an 'anchor', adjusting it to reach a more plausible answer, even if the anchor is obviously incorrect. The adjustment is frequently insufficient and so the final answer is biased. In this paper, we report a study to investigate the effects of this phenomenon on software estimation processes. The results show that anchoring and adjustment does occur in software estimation, and can significantly change the resulting estimates, no matter what estimation technique is used. The results also suggest that, considering the magnitude of this bias, software estimators tend to be too confident of their own estimations.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.100
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.633
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.100
Threshold uncertainty score0.530

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1000.633
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.005
Science and technology studies0.0020.011
Scholarly communication0.0070.012
Open science0.0020.006
Research integrity0.0040.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.253
Teacher spread0.238 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations26
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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