What is it about?

Many creative techniques are designed for situations where people are interacting in-person. For example, using sticky notes and a whiteboard when following a structured brainstorming technique inside a meeting room with all participants physically present. By necessity, such techniques need to be adapted to work successfully for distributed software teams where colleagues are based in different offices or working from home. Remote brainstorming over video conferencing and facilitated by a digital whiteboard is one such technique covered in this paper along with seven others. Other approaches described include mob programming or asynchronous designing. Each approach is described along with various factors that can help teams decide which approach may be most beneficial depending on what outcome they are looking for e.g. breadth of ideas rather than deep exploration of one.

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Why is it important?

Creativity is an integral part of software development. Creativity helps in many ways such as identifying novel features to delight customers, to shoehorning a complex requirement into a legacy system, fixing bugs, and more generally overcoming the obstacles regularly encountered when developing software. It can be hard to promote creativity when working apart so this paper provides practical guidance on approaches teams can take to spur creativity in distributed software teams.

Perspectives

My personal view is that distributed teams can be creative but it is possibly harder as you cannot rely on the serendipitous encounters that occur when everyone is working in the office. You need to be a bit more intentional to promote creativity. My hope is the practical approaches outlined in this paper can help teams be creative even when team members are working apart.

Victoria Jackson
University of Southampton

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Team Creativity in a Hybrid Software Development World: Eight Approaches, IEEE Software, March 2023, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
DOI: 10.1109/ms.2022.3229353.
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