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If you manage a small company or a start-up, you probably have your QA tester doubling as your customer support department. Or you may have made your lead architect your chief coder and unit tester in order to save scarce development resources. These kinds of moves are a financial necessity if you do not have the capacity to focus people on isolated functions of software development.

In companies that have the necessary resources, the staff is often split by function or sub-function. One person may be in charge of all on-line help documentation, and another may be in charge of all product training materials. If you manage a large software development organization, you may have hundreds of people in highly specialized sub-functions.

However, regardless of resources, it is your job as a leader of the software development effort to allocate your resources appropriately and ensure that the important functions are accounted for. In this article, we have simplified the main functions of software development. We hope that you can use this as a mental checklist to make sure that all of your development functions are executed and coordinated, regardless of whether you have 5 or 500 people in your organization.

As you read through the different functions, you may want to spend a few minutes thinking about where you may have gaps. By seeing the whole functional landscape of software development, it often becomes clear which areas are sources of strength, and which areas are in need of improvement. As you identify your areas for improvement, you can use this framework as a reference to drill into more detail on the subfunctions that may be wanting in your particular organization, but we hope it is a useful starting point.

http://www.advanceddecisions.com/resources/whitepapers/8-uncategorized/23-the-six-main-functions-of-a-software-development-organization.html

11 years ago. Rating: 1
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