Towards Hypotheses on Creativity in Software Development

Abstract

Abstract. Though more and more researchers have realized the importance of creativity in software development, there are few empirical studies reported on this topic. In this paper, we present an exploratory empirical research in which several issues on creativity in software development are studied, that is, which development phases are perceived to include more creative work, whether or not UML-based documentation can make developers perceive more time is devoted to creative work, whether or not more creative work can accelerate the software development speed, and whether developers more prefer to do the creative work. Based on result analyses, we proposed four hypotheses to direct the future research in this field and discussed the challenge that 'since developers do not like to participate in those improving activities (quality assuring activities), how can we keep and improve software quality effectively and efficiently?'

Examining Leader-Member Exchange as a Moderator of the Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Creativity of Software Developers

“…Software developers were selected as the sample population, since creativity is critical in performing their jobs (Gu & Tong, 2004). Software development includes various tasks such as requirement engineering, software structure design, and programming, each of which requires creativity, idea generation, and intuition (Robillard, 1999).…”

“…To examine these relationships, software developers in three large high-tech firms in South Korea participated in the survey as a part of consulting projects. Since creativity is an important attribute for software developers in performing their jobs (Gu & Tong, 2004), the data from this sample should be appropriate for this study. The results can practically help help understand the role of leadership in enhancing employees' creativity.…”

Creativity as a pathway to computer science

“…In programming courses, allowing and encouraging students to be creative increased motivation and interest [9,10,15] 2. Students of CS perceived software development as creative, and these phases were preferred [4,13] 3. Computers and software tools can support creativity [2,21,22] In [14], we proposed a model where three comparable dimensions of creativity in the field of CS and their impact on CS education were illustrated and described.…”

Communication and Creative Thinking in Agile Software Development

“…Then, according to the previous ideas the use of creativity in software development is undeniable, but requirements engineering is not recognized as a creative process in all the cases [17]. In a few publications the importance of creativity has been investigated in all the phases of software development process [18,15,19] and mostly focused in the requirements engineering [20][21][22]. Nevertheless, the use of techniques to foster creativity in requirements engineering is still shortly investigated, it is not surprising that the role of communication and interaction is central in many of the creativity techniques.…”

“…We believe that the innovation and development of new products is an interdisciplinary issue [14], we are interested in the study of the potential of new concepts and techniques to foster creativity in software engineering [15]. This paper is organized as follows: in section 2 we explain the motivation of this work fixing the relevance of Creativity in Software Development.…”