Addressing Ambiguities in Software Team's Roles and Responsibilities: Minimizing Accountability Problems

Abstract

A software team consists of several individuals who are assigned different roles and responsibilities. Mostly these roles and responsibilities are not clear among team members. Due to this ambiguity, expectation about roles and responsibilities of an individual in a team is different between this individual and other team members. This ambiguity further leads to issues at the time of accountability and leads to blame games among team members. To create a culture of accountability, every team member should be very clear about his/her role, responsibilities and expectations from him/her. This paper addresses this problem of ambiguity in roles and responsibilities of software team members. We conducted a survey of various software development organizations to know how software teams look at these problems and what tools and techniques they are using to clarify roles and responsibilities. We have surveyed software teams having diverse experience ranging from less than one year to twenty plus years and diverse roles from internee to senior project manager so that any type of bias should not affect our results. After analysis of survey results, our findings reveal what industry practitioners think about this issue of ambiguity in roles and responsibilities and how they are addressing and managing this issue. Based on this analysis we have outlined the main findings and the best tools that software industry is using to successfully identify this issue of ambiguity in roles and responsibilities.