Role and Identity Work of Software Engineering Professionals in the Generative AI Era

Abstract: The adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) suggests major changes for software engineering, including technical aspects but also human aspects of the professionals involved. One of these aspects is how individuals perceive themselves regarding their work, i.e., their work identity, and the processes they perform to form, adapt and reject these identities, i.e., identity work. Existent studies provide evidence of such identity work of software professionals triggered by the adoption of GenAI, however they do not consider differences among diverse roles, such as developers and testers. In this paper, we argue the need for considering the role as a factor defining the identity work of software professionals. To support our claim, we review some studies regarding different roles and also recent studies on how to adopt GenAI in software engineering. Then, we propose a research agenda to better understand how the role influences identity work of software professionals triggered by the adoption of GenAI, and, based on that, to propose new artifacts to support this adoption. We also discuss the potential implications for practice of the results to be obtained.