162 Human Error Descriptions and Categorizations from a User Study

Software Engineers' Human Errors

This dataset contains descriptions of 162 human errors experienced by software engineering students during a user study described in the following publication:

• Benjamin S. Meyers and Andrew Meneely. Taxonomy-Based Human Error Assessment for Senior Software Engineering Students. Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium. Forthcoming in 2024.

Included Files

The "experienced_human_errors.csv" file contains a dataset of 162 human errors experienced during our user study. Participants documented their human errors in a Google Form with 8 questions.

CSV Fields

• PARTICIPANT: Anonymous participant ID.
• INTERVIEW_DATE: Date of interview discussing human error.
• ID: Unique ID for experienced human error. Prefixed with "P1" for Phase 1 or "P2" for Phase 2.
• FINAL_CATEGORIZATION: Agreed upon T.H.E.S.E. categorization following discussion with interview facilitator.
• QUESTION_1: Anonymized participant answer to Question 1.
• QUESTION_2: Anonymized participant answer to Question 2.
• QUESTION_3: Anonymized participant answer to Question 3.
• QUESTION_4: Anonymized participant answer to Question 4.
• QUESTION_5: Anonymized participant answer to Question 5.
• QUESTION_6: Anonymized participant answer to Question 6.
• QUESTION_7: Anonymized participant answer to Question 7.
• QUESTION_8: Anonymized participant answer to Question 8.

Interview Questions

1. Please briefly describe the human error that you experienced.
2. If the human error you experienced resulted in a defect that was committed, please provide a link (or Git commit hash) to the commit below.
3. Is your human error a slip, lapse, or mistake?
4. Now, please examine the Taxonomy of Human Errors in Software Engineering (T.H.E.S.E.) and choose the specific human error that most accurately describes the human error you experienced. If you experienced multiple human errors, please submit this form once for each human error.
5. If there are other categories of human error that also describe the human error that you experienced, please note them here.
6. If you chose a 'General' or 'Other' category in Question (4), this question is required. Do you believe there is a missing human error category that better describes the human error that you experienced? If yes, please describe it below.
7. On a scale of 1 (not at all confident) to 5 (completely confident), how confident are you in your classification in the previous question?
8. Do you have any additional comments about this human error?

Anonymity

Institutional Review Board approval for this research involving human subjects was granted by the Human Subjects Research Office at RIT on March 18, 2022. Participants signed an informed consent form acknowledging that (1) their participation was entirely voluntary and had no impact on their grades, and (2) their survey responses would be published in an anonymized format. All data released with this publication has been anonymized by replacing any personally identifiable information with participant identifiers.

Contact

Please contact Benjamin S. Meyers (email) with questions about this data and its collection.

Acknowledgments

Collection of this data has been sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation (grant 1922169), by the NSA Science of Security Lablet program (grant H98230-17-D-0080/2018-0438-02), and by a Department of Defense DARPA SBIR program (grant 140D63-19-C-0018).