The Risk-Taking Software Engineer: A Framed Portrait

01/21/2023

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by   Lorenz Graf-Vlachy, et al.

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Background: Risk-taking is prevalent in a host of activities performed by software engineers on a daily basis, yet there is scant research on it. Aims and Method: We study if software engineers' risk-taking is affected by framing effects and by software engineers' personality. To this end, we perform a survey experiment with 124 software engineers. Results: We find that framing substantially affects their risk-taking. None of the "Big Five" personality traits are related to risk-taking in software engineers after correcting for multiple testing. Conclusions: Software engineers and their managers must be aware of framing effects and account for them properly.