Effective management of roles and responsibilities: Driving accountability in software development teams
by Y. Dubinsky,
A. Yaeli,
and A. Kofman
Teams differ in the way they define roles and responsibilities and in
the level of formalism by which they establish and communicate
these definitions. Responsibilities are not always clearly defined,
and there is often confusion or mismatch between the individual’s
perspectives of a role and the expectations of that role by other team
members. This lack of shared understanding can lead to issues in
performance and lack of accountability. We review the notion of role
specification as part of software development governance and
present an approach for specifying responsibilities in terms of
decisions to be made during the life cycle of software development
artifacts. We present evaluation data from software teams as they
redefine their roles and shape their responsibilities. We further
present a tool for governance specification based on this approach,
which can ensure that these specifications are adhered to in the
software development platform. We conclude by describing a
methodology for how the tool and approach can be implemented to
help software development teams understand and evolve the
appropriate governance for their needs.
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