Availability heuristic is a cognitive bias where people tend to rely on immediate examples or information that come to mind when making decisions or judgments. This can lead people to overestimate the likelihood of events or outcomes based on how easily they can recall similar instances, regardless of how rare or common those events might actually be.
In software testing, here are three examples:
In software testing, here are three examples:
- A persons tendency to lean towards using a testing tool, or methodology simply because they used or learned it recently, even when a different tool or approach would be more suitable.
- When encountering a bug, a persons tendency to assume its cause is something they’ve seen recently while the actual root cause could be a different issue entirely, especially if that is a more obscure issue.
- Using the same set of functional test cases across multiple projects without adapting them to the unique requirements or challenges of the current project.
The availability heuristic should be overcome by discussing ideas with peers (who might be able to provide different perspectives or tooling choices), favouring data-driven decisions (using data to understand root causes or prioritise testing efforts) and using risk analysis to guide testing efforts i.e. Focus on high-risk areas of the software based on the business impact, user behavior, and technical complexity, rather than relying on gut feeling or past experiences alone.
