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Cognitive biases are hardwired behaviors that influence developer actions and can set them on an incorrect course of action, necessitating backtracking. Although researchers have found that cognitive biases occur in development tasks in controlled lab studies, we still do not know how these biases affect developers' everyday behavior. Without such an understanding, development tools and practices remain inadequate. To close this gap, we conducted a two-part field study to examine the extent to which cognitive biases occur, the consequences of these biases on developer behavior, and the practices and tools that developers use to deal with these biases. We found about 70% of observed actions were associated with at least one cognitive bias. Even though developers recognized that biases frequently occur, they are forced to deal with such issues with ad hoc processes and suboptimal tool support. As one participant (IP12) lamented: There is no salvation! 

Abstract End users are increasingly using trigger-action platforms like If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) to create applets to connect smart-home devices and services. However, there are inherent implicit risks in using such applets—even non-malicious ones—as sensitive information may leak through their use in certain contexts ( e.g., where the device is located, who can observe the resultant action). This work aims to understand to what extent end users can assess this implicit risk. More importantly we explore whether usage context makes a difference in end-users’ perception of such risks. Our work complements prior work that has identified the impact of usage context on expert evaluation of risks in IFTTT by focusing the impact of usage context on end-users’ risk perception. Through a Mechanical Turk survey of 386 participants on 49 smart-home IFTTT applets, we found that participants have a nuanced view of contextual factors and that different values for contextual factors impact end-users’ risk perception differently. Further, our findings show that nudging the participants to think about different usage contexts led them to think deeper about the associated risks and raise their concern scores.