ChatGPT as a Software Development Tool : The Future of Development

Abstract: The purpose of this master’s thesis was to research and evaluate how ChatGPT can be used as a tool in software developers’ daily work activities. In order to do this, the thesis was conducted in two phases, the initial exploration phase and the data collection phase. In the initial exploration phase, five senior-level developers were interviewed about their day-to-day work, opinions of generative AI, and the profession of software developers as a whole. From these interviews, a theoretical foundation for software development was formed, categorizing the daily work tasks of a software developer into either coding, communication, or planning. This theoretical foundation was then used as the basis for the tasks and interviews used during the data collection phase. In the data collection phase, seven developers, ranging from students to industry veterans, were asked to complete a set of representative tasks with the help of ChatGPT and afterward participate in an interview. The tasks were based upon the theoretical foundation of software development and aimed to serve as representative tasks that software developers have to do in their day-to-day work. Based on the tasks and interviews it was found that the use of ChatGPT did in fact help make software developers more effective when it came to coding and planning-based tasks, but not without risk since it was shown that junior developers trusted and relied more on the answers given by ChatGPT. Although ChatGPT showed a positive effect, the tooling still needs improvement, since the developers had trouble with the text formatting when completing communication-based tasks, as well as them expressing a desire for the tooling to be more integrated. However, this desire was not unexpected, since all of the developers involved showed interest in working with generative AI tooling for work-related tasks in the future.