Team Roles and Responsibility Areas

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This document describes various responsibility areas. Each team member must take responsibility for one or more areas. They have roles corresponding to the areas that they take up e.g. the Team Coordinator takes responsibility for the Teamwork area. Roles will last for the length of the quarter, however you are encouraged to switch roles periodically if everyone in the team is agreeable to it. Please inform the instructor of changes in roles, and also note the change on the Team Roster document.

 

Note that roles indicate responsibility for ensuring that particular concerns get addressed well, NOT that the person who has the role must do all the activities for the role. Thus it may happen that the team coordinator participates extensively in testing, while the testing coordinator helps to sort out configuration management problems. Assigning coordination responsibilities to a particular individual indicates that they must take leadership in ensuring that the objectives in that area are met as well as possible. The specific activities in each area may be done by any of the members on the team, based on knowledge and ability, allocated tasks and need. Ultimately, all team members share responsibility for the success of the project i.e. everyone is empowered to contribute in any area and any way they can.

As a team you may decide to equally share all roles, and this is an acceptable approach. However, your team must define a team coordinator.

 

It should be strongly understood that all team members participate in development and unit testing of their code.

 

Review the list of goals for your role(s) every week, and make sure that they are being met. If they are not being met, this is an issue that must be brought up and resolved.

 

Teamwork (Team Coordinator)

Teamwork focuses on effective cooperation within the team. The goals include:

• Participation: Everyone on the team must participate in ensuring the success of the project. They must be fully involved in team meetings and decision making. Everyone must have a shared understanding of the goals, the decisions (technical as well as managerial), and the reasoning behind decisions.
• Effective use of resources: Each member of the team should be put in a position where they can contribute effectively to the project e.g. if someone is good with tools, but not strong in Java, they should be given opportunities to contribute based on their strengths.
• Alignment with individual goals: People who have an interest in developing a particular aspect of their skills should be given an opportunity to do so (if possible). For example, if someone wants to learn more about building GUIs, interface development tasks may be given to them, even if they are not proficient at it.
  
  (Note that sometimes there may be conflicts between team needs and individual desires: the team may benefit more from a task being done by somebody who can do it well, but someone else may be more interested in doing the task, even though they are not good at it. Balancing such considerations is one of the challenges in teamwork. Tasks that “no one wants to do” must be shared fairly among team members.)
• Motivation: All team members should be motivated to meet the team goals and produce a really good product.
• Interfacing with the instructor: The instructor should be kept informed of progress and issues.
• Effective meetings: Team meetings should be participatory, orderly, short and effective in decision-making and alignment (i.e. ensuring everyone on the team is on the same page). 10 – 15 minutes of class time will be set aside at least once per week for quick team meetings.
• Issue resolution: Any problems within the team should be identified and resolved.

• Timeliness: Each deliverable should be completed on time.

 

The Team Coordinator may or may not serve as a “team leader”.

Capabilities needed: Work well with people: good communication, interaction and empathy (“understand where each person is coming from”). Creative problem-solving to resolve tough situations. Meeting facilitation skills.

 

Requirements Management (Requirements Coordinator)

If you do a great job of building the wrong product, all your effort is wasted. Hence requirements are critical to product success. Goals include:

• Understanding the project goals. The project description document describes the goals, and the Project Concept and Requirements should be checked to make sure that all the goals are met.
• Understanding customer needs. The instructor serves as the customer. The Project Concept and Requirements should be checked with the customer, and there should be constant continuing interaction with the customer to check whether the product being built meets all customer needs.
• Documenting the requirements: Creating the requirements document and keeping it updated.
• Managing requirements changes. Requirements changes may originate in three ways: either customers may change or add new requirements, or there may be errors in the requirements that need fixing, or the development team may come up with ideas for improving the product. In all cases, the change to requirements must be managed. When requirements change, the entire development team must be informed, and all development artifacts (designs, code, documentation) must be updated to be consistent with the changed requirement. Also the customer must be kept informed of the change. If the development team wants to modify the product requirements, it may only do so with prior consent from the customer, otherwise the changes will be considered to be bugs. For example, if you wish to add context-sensitive help to your product, but this was not part of the original requirements, you must obtain the consent of the instructor before adding it. (Yes, this is how it works in industry – unauthorized “improvements” are NOT welcome).

 

Capabilities needed: User-oriented thinking and user focus. Good interaction skills. Preferably some knowledge of the problem domain.

 

Test Management (Test Coordinator)

Good test design and effective testing require considerable technical skill and creativity, and have a huge impact on project success. Goals include:

• Test strategy: Selecting the test strategy, particularly for integration testing. Identifying module granularity for unit testing.
• Testing: Performing tests, identifying failures and ensuring the problems are fixed.
• Regression testing: Deciding which tests need to be performed again when changes are made to the implementation.
• Tracking and reporting: Keeping track of which tests were executed, whether they passed or failed, and re-doing tests after bug fixes.

 

Capabilities needed: Excellent understanding of the requirements and design. Excellent development understanding (actually test coordination needs this as much or more than development coordination). Being systematic and organized. High technical creativity.

 

Configuration Management and Tools Support (Configuration Manager)

Configuration management is critical to the success of team efforts with multiple artifacts and releases. Goals include:

• Managing concurrent activity: If multiple team members try to make changes to the same files concurrently, chaos can result. Configuration management tools such as CVS or git and development environments such as Visual Studio (or Eclipse) provide part of the solution, but they must be complemented by procedures that minimize the possibility of unwanted conflicts, while still enabling work to get done most effectively.
• Using versioning for releases and for backup: Artifacts such as documents and code evolve continuously, but it is necessary to create “release” versions for customers (instructors) so that what they see is consistent and does not keep changing. Versioning is also critical for creating backups, so that if something goes wrong, the team has a recent “good” version to fall back upon.
• Defining build procedures for integration: When several people are working on code simultaneously and constantly making changes, each of them need to compile and test their code together with everyone else’s code – but they want to see “good” versions of other people’s code that does not have compile errors! Facilitating this requires careful setup of a hierarchy of workspaces and defining build procedures for the team.
• Identifying and selecting tools and other resources to support development: This includes both selecting the basic development tools such as compilers, as well as identifying tools that simplify development such as GUI builders and test generators.
• Tools expertise: One of the biggest hurdles typically faced in projects is hassles with the development tools: something goes wrong and all hell breaks loose until someone who understands the tools well can fix things. Time and energy spent in learning how to use the tools properly saves large amounts of effort later on, and at least one person on the team needs to develop expertise on each tool.

 

Capabilities needed: Familiarity with tools / willingness to invest large amounts of time in learning them well. An understanding of the challenges of concurrent development, and the concepts underlying configuration management. An interest in “finding easier ways to get things done”. A “support mentality” – enthusiasm to help other people to work more effectively.