Learning from Google's Research into Creativity in Software Engineers[Storytime Saturdays]
Exploring the relationship between creativity and developer productivity
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Developer creativity is a criminally understudied field.
However, to unlock peak performance in your teams, higher creativity is a must. Better creativity in software engineering can help you solve difficult problems, redefine problems to cut costs, reconstruct existing solutions to make them more readable, reduce employee turnover by helping work feel less monotonous, and much more. For today’s article, we will be reviewing “Creativity in Software Engineering”, written by Google’s Engineering Productivity Research team. This paper shares findings from their study exploring how software developers define creativity. We will cover its most striking findings and build upon them with a discussion of how tech teams can foster an environment to encourage creativity.
With the recent changes in the ways we work, from new hybrid models to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), there is an increased attention on creativity in the workplace. As software engineering continues to evolve, it is essential that we consider creativity as a core aspect of the developer experience and ensure that we are building tooling and processes to support it.
The goal here is not the creation/identification of individually creative individuals (which is what most research on creativity focuses on), but a study of how we can design our processes/developer experiences to institute a culture of creativity throughout the company. If you are looking for a more individualized perspective on how software engineers and how you can become great software engineer, you would love our writeup on Microsoft’s excellent research, “What Distinguishes Great Software Engineers?”
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Understanding Creativity for Software Engineering
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