Creativity in the Everyday Work of Software Professionals
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| Publicado en: | ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2025) |
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| Acceso en línea: | Citation/Abstract Full Text - PDF |
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| Resumen: | Creativity is a key component of software development. Improving the performance of mobile games, optimizing project plans, and fixing an obscure bug are just some of the diverse tasks common to software development identified in my research, where creativity can help. However, despite its importance, everyday creativity is often unnoticed and less understood than in environments designed for innovation, such as hackathons. This dissertation explores everyday creativity---a form of creativity that occurs when individuals respond to daily tasks in an original and meaningful way. I explore several aspects of creativity within the everyday work of software teams, including professionals' perceptions of creativity, how individuals organize themselves for creative work, the role of tools (including Large Language Models (LLMs)) in supporting creative work, and the overall impact of creativity on their work. Specifically, this dissertation contributes three qualitative studies. The first study interviews 25 software professionals to determine how fully remote software teams co-create the artifacts necessary for their work. The second study builds on the first, examining how creativity manifests in everyday work through a diary and interview study of 30 software professionals. The third study is a laboratory-based study that examines how 18 pairs of software professionals utilize an LLM to assist in software design to determine how creativity arises and the LLM's influence on the design process and final design. Drawing on established theoretical models and definitions of creativity, I find that everyday creativity in software professionals exists on a continuum from initial levels indicating learning to more professional levels indicating expertise. Everyday creativity is conceptualized primarily as a problem-solving process where the usefulness of a solution takes precedence over its novelty. Both individual and collaborative creativity play significant roles. Individuals often structure their schedules to balance periods of solo, asynchronous work for deep thinking, with collaborative, synchronous work to share and discuss ideas and solutions. When co-creating the design with an LLM, the LLM had a limited contribution to creativity within the design process and the final design document. Instead, much of the creativity comes from the designers' prior experiences, knowledge, and human traits, such as empathy. Overall, the collective findings highlight that everyday creativity is important and benefits both individuals and organizations. It is important to retain this creativity as the nature of software development changes through the ongoing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) backed developer tools. Suggested ways to achieve this include empowering developer teams to organize for everyday creativity and to develop novel AI-backed developer tools to augment human creativity that complement the existing, productivity focused AI-based developer tools. |
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| ISBN: | 9798293805105 |
| Fuente: | ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global |