PI: Prof. Dr. Robert Hirschfeld

Abstract

What would it mean for a programmer to work like a designer? Divergent and convergent thinking, externalizing thoughts, supporting thinking by doing, working on parallel lines of thought—we claim that such design methods can significantly improve program design outcomes, which are increasingly important for software development and evolution. Unfortunately, there is little meaningful data to confirm our claim. We propose deriving hypotheses from this claim and conducting empirical experiments to test them.

In the second year our efforts will focus on the effect of divergent thinking to program design results and possibilities to encourage this practice through adequate tool support. Our results will eventually affect how programmers are educated and large software systems are developed, and it will make design thinking become vitally important for both student and professional programmers.