As always, these are my opinions and my opinions only. I’d love to get feedback, and hear what roles other people find necessary or unnecessary.
I am not claiming that the roles that I mention are always necessary for a project to succeed, or even that they are necessary when in an EDD project. They are, however, roles that I find will help the project along the way towards becoming a better project.
The roles are not necessarily full-time jobs, and a person could fulfill several roles at the same time, as long as that person has the right skill-set for each of those roles.
So, apart from a project manager, software architects and developers, what roles do I think should be part of a team’s setup?
- QA manager
- Configuration manager
- Deployment manager
- Defect manager
- Test manager
- Release manager
- End user representative
QA Manager
Let’s be honest, when a project is under a great deal of pressure, and has been so for a while, the developers start cutting corners. This is the only way they can remain any hope of making it on time.
This means that it’s necessary to have someone who is responsible for the code quality, and who have the jurisdiction to enforce coding standards.
Depending on how bad shape the code is, this can either be a small task among other tasks, or it can be a full-time job. If there is a lot of legacy code, the QA manager will have a hard time getting the code up to par, even if the legacy code is ignored. It’s a sad fact that code which is being written for a crappy code base will most likely also be crappy – it’s the “broken window syndrome”. Why bother with writing clear, beautiful code, when it’s going to be part of a messy, unclear code base?
The QA manager needs to be respected by the other developers, and must be able to help mentoring less experience developers on how to solve problems in the correct way.
Configuration manager
We probably all know this situation. The tests have gone well, everything seems to work, but when it’s deployed out to the production environment, the system suddenly fails, and no one knows why. After some frantic work, it’s found out that one of the settings in the configuration was wrong – it might have been overwritten by a test setting, it might not have been deployed, or there might be something else wrong. Whatever the reason, it’s a situation which should be avoided at all costs.
This is where the configuration manager comes in. That’s the person responsible for ensuring that the configurations are correct and the right version on all systems. Every time a change is made to the configurations, the configuration manager should be involved.
Deployment manager
Deploying systems is a hard, thankless task, and most developers don’t want to do it. The deployment manager is responsible for the deployment of the system, ensuring that all the correct information is filled out, that the people who need to know that the deployment is happening get to hear it, and that the deployment went well. In case the deployment didn’t go well, the deployment manager is responsible for finding out what went wrong, and to fix the problems.
If you get the right deployment manager, he or she will try to ensure that the deployment procedure gets automated, so he or she will have fewer things to worry about in the deployment phase.
A deployment manager is not the same as a release manager (see below), as the deployment manager is focused on the entire system, while the release manager should only focus on the parts of the system affected by that specific release. This means that while the deployment manager should ensure that each and every subsystem is running after a deployment, the deployment manager is not responsible for smoke testing the system – that’s up to the release and test managers.
Defect manager
When you are in an EDD project you will get a large number of reported defects (called defects for short), and it’s a quite good idea to have a single point of entry for those defects. The purpose for this is to ensure that the developers don’t get disturbed by defect reports all the time, and to make it easier to weed the defects for duplicates and hidden change requests (a future post will go into these differences).
The defect manager should also be the single point of contact, regarding defects, for people outside the team. This means that if a tester has a question regarding some behavior which might be a defect, the tester should talk with the defect manager.
The defect manager should have clear guidelines from the project leader about how the defect should be prioritized, both in relation to each other, but also in relation to other tasks, such as new development.
My rule of thumb would be that critical defects (e.g. parts of the system doesn’t work), should be have highest priority, but otherwise defects should be solved when someone is working on the general area they are connected to. Of course, in the case of defects found in new functionality for the release, they should always be fixed straight away.
Test manager
Given my heavy focus on testing (see my earlier post on the subject), I guess it should not come as a surprise that I feel that there should be a person dedicated to coordinating the tests.
The test manager is responsible for ensuring that all relevant tests are run every time a new release is on the way, that tests are modified as required, and that new tests are added as new requirements appear.
A good test manager should focus on automating as much of the test process as possible (but not so much that the test quality suffer), and ensuring that everything is tested sufficiently. The test manager should also always be on the lookout for new tools and techniques for testing.
Release manager
A release manager is the person responsible for a particular release, keeping track on everything related to that specific release.
During deployment it might be hard to tell the differences between a deployment manager and a release manager, but there are some key differences. A deployment manager is responsible for ensuring that the deployment process goes as it should, while the release manager is responsible for ensuring that the correct things are deployed for that particular release, and that that particular release works as it should after deployment. In other words, the release manager is responsible for making the package which should be deployed, while the deployment manager ensures that the package is actually deployed.
End user representative
If at all possible, there should be at least one representative from the end users in the team. This person should be available to answer any questions the other team members might have regarding the domain the system should work in.
Sometimes a requirement seems ambiguous to a developer, while being quite clear to someone who knows the domain better. If there isn’t an end user representative available, the developer will often end up guessing how the requirement should be understood, and design and implement based on that guess – often resulting in a wrong design/implementation – or the developer will have to waste time finding someone who correctly understand the requirement and pass the information on to the developer.
Having an end user representative on-site, will allow the developer to quickly get feedback on how to understand the requirement, reducing the development time and/or number of wrong design decisions and implementations.
How should the work be divided between the roles?
There is a certain amount of overlap between what can be considered the area of responsibility of the different roles, so I thought I should try to explain how I see the divide.
- Defects should be handled by the defect manager, but the release managers should be aware of what defects are solved in their releases. The test manager gets to say whether a defect has been solved or not (do they pass the tests).
- Configuration managers should handle configuration of servers etc., but should work closely with the release managers to ensure that all configuration changes in the releases are taken care of. The configuration manager also needs to work with the deployment manager to ensure that configuration changes are deployed correctly.
- Release managers should work closely with the deployment manager to ensure that the releases are deployed correctly. By “correctly” I mean that they should not only make sure that the system is up and running afterwards (this is the deployment manager’s job), but ensure that it’s the correct releases which are up and running. The test manager should be the one responsible for testing that all the additions, modifications, and corrections are deployed, but the release manager is in charge of keeping track of what additions, modifications, and corrections are part of the deploy.
For a different way of explaining this, let’s go through the process:
1) A new release is defined, and a release manager is appointed. The release manager work together with the rest of the team to ensure that the release is finished on time.
2) The test manager starts ensuring that there are tests covering new functionality, and modifies any existing tests as warranted.
3) While developing the new release, the code is continuously committed, built and tested. The test manager ensures that all errors found during the testing are reported to the defect manager.
4) The defect manager prioritizes the errors, and make sure that they are added to the tasks for the release if relevant. When doing this, the defect manager ensures that the release manager and QA manager are aware of the open defects.
5) Any fixed defect goes to the test manager, who either confirms the fix or reopens the defect as not solved.
6) The release manager informs the configuration manager of any changes to the configuration.
7) During the development of the new release, the QA manager will do general QA work, enforcing coding standards, do code reviews etc. If any area gets a large number of defects, this area will be in the QA manager’s focus.
8) After the release is done, passing the tests sufficiently, the release manager makes sure that all the relevant code is made into a deployment package, and hands this over to the deployment manager.
9) The deployment manager goes through the deployment steps, ensuring that the deployment goes well.
10) After the deployment has gone well, the configuration manager ensures that the configuration is correct.
11) The test manager tests that the deployed version corresponds with the release version [go through steps 8 through 11 as many times as necessary until it’s right]
12) Finally, the release manager signs off the release, filling out whatever papers are necessary, informing the necessary people about the release etc. [this might be handled by the project leader together with the release manager]
Note that there frequently will be several test environments which the deployment should go through, but the release manager is only responsible for the first deployment, while the rest presumably can be handled by the deployment manager alone.
