Characteristics of decision-making during coding
Paul Ralph, Ewan D. Tempero · 2016
Code appears replete with decisions including logic, organization, presentation and library use. But are developers consciously making these decisions or does it only look that way post hoc? Analysis of 104 developer interviews indicates that developers make many decisions concerning design, architecture, scope and technology use. However, they struggle to reconstruct codefocused choices between two or more alternatives. This suggests that decision-making is not the dominant cognitive process underlying coding behavior, which raises questions about how we teach coding and how we evaluate coding performance.