Category: creativity

Creativity as the Root of Software Development

August 26, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

There is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. At least 60 different definitions of creativity can be found in psychological literature. However, a widespread conception of creativity is that it manifests itself in the production of things that are both original and useful. (from: Wikipedia)

Original
The basic idea of writing software is to produce code that has not been produced before. Techniques like object-orientation, component-based design, service-oriented architecture, and refactoring are all there to help you in making each line of code unique. Ultimately, software developers think that, in a perfect world, each piece of code exists only once. And in searching for this utopia, trying to prevent any repetition of work, software developers have far more possibilities than, say, writers, painters, architects, and hairdressers. None of these other creative people have a similar array of techniques for abstraction and indirection. (In fact, they probably don't even know what that is.)