Common Roles in A Software House
Organizing a software house is very specialized type of management skill, where experienced persons can turn the organizational problem into a unique benefit. For example, having sub-teams spread in different time zones may allow a 24-hour company working day, if the teams, systems and procedures are well established. A good example is the test team in time zone 8 hours ahead or behind the development team, who fix software bugs found by the testers.
A professional software house normally consists of at least three dedicated sub-teams :
- business analysts who define the business needs of the market
- software designers/programmers who create the technical specification and write the software
- software testers who are responsible for the whole process of quality management
In bigger software houses, greater specialization is employed, and quite often there are also:
- technical writers who write all the documentation such as user guides
- release specialists who are responsible for building the whole product and software versioning
- graphic designers who are particularly important in the gaming industry and elsewhere. They are normally responsible for the design of the graphical user interface.
- maintenance engineers who are behind two, three or more lines of support
- consultants responsible for making the solution operational, especially if some specialist knowledge is necessary. Examples of this include: building multidimensional cubes in business intelligence software, integrating with existing solutions, and implementing business scenarios in Business Process Management software.
The cons:
- people are not focused so much on the specialization
- each person must be very flexible and have the ability to play each role (not each person is willing to do that)
- the approach is possible just for smaller, less formalized organizations
The pros:
- each person has full knowledge about the full production cycle
- people are doing various tasks what makes especially young people excited about their work
- there is a very good possibility to manage the work load especially in crisis situations like "all hands on pump"
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