Creativity is widely seen as a key quality of software developers, yet empirical software engineering rarely examines its manifestation in coding. We take a process-level view by linking psychometric creativity assessments to fine-grained eye-tracking and IDE interaction data from a controlled game implementation task. In a laboratory study with 40 Python-proficient participants implementing scoring logic for a Pong game, we derive programming strategy profiles from joint gaze and code editing behavior and relate them to scores on three well-validated creativity tests.

The software engineering research community has begun recognizing the importance of human factors in the field. Yet, there remains a limited focus on the role of creativity in software development beyond requirement engineering. Given that software development fundamentally entails problem solving that requires creativity, this innovative paper explores the relationship between coding approaches and developer creativity, particularly in functionality development tasks.

The Pull-Based development model, a fundamental mechanism of collaboration in modern software engineering (SE), initiates the code review process when a contributor submits pull requests (PRs) for evaluation. Although the decision to approve or decline PRs is often perceived as grounded in their technical quality, prior research presents a more intricate narrative where both non technical factors-beyond the code itself and technical factors influence the acceptance. This study, uniquely integrating cues of urgency (represented by code priority level) and reputation (represented by the experience level of the code's author), delves into these biases, leveraging eye-tracking technology to illuminate the cognitive processes underpinning the evaluation of PRs.