Task: Learning Goals Relevance

It is very likely that you will find the learning goals of this course useful in your later career, no matter what your detailed role is. For simplicity, we can distinguish between three different roles: developer, product owner, and project manager.

• Developers plan and build the actual system, from the requirements towards the running code.
• Product owners represent the people or organizations that provide the money for a project and system, and hence have specific interests in the system.
• Project managers lead a team of developers and are responsible towards the product owner to deliver a system.

In the following, you should estimate how relevant the learning goals of this course are for the different roles.

• Find the document Learning Goal Relevance, and make a copy.
• Assign the relative importance of the goal to the individual roles.
  • - for not relevant
  • + for relevant
  • ++ for very relevant
• Work first individually, and assign the relevance on your own.
• Discuss then in team and compare your results, agree on a common solution.
• Create one final version for the whole team.

More Detailed Role Descriptions

For this activity, we work with three simplified roles. In reality, they can be more subtle and vague, and some roles are combined. What is important for now is that you start getting aware that different roles during development exist, and that they have different tasks and responsibilities, and therefore have different motivations, interests and require different skills.

Role: Developers

Developers usually work in a team of several developers. This will also be most likely your first position when you work in industry as an engineers. With respect to software, it often means that the task involve programming or building a system, but it can also mean to work on requirements with customers, do testing or other technical tasks. Developers are the one with technical expertise and know about how to build a system or product, but are not necessarily the ones answering why a certain product should be built or which features it should have.

Role: Product Owner

The product owner is usually a single person, with the responsibility to maximize the value of the product to its owner, which usually pay for the development in the first place. Note that the owners of a system are distinct from its users.

Role: Project Manager

The project manager is usually a single person, with the responsibility to manage the development team. This means to assign tasks and plan ahead, so that all resources are available. The project manager usually does not any detailed technical work, which is delegated to the developers.

Example for Roles: A software house with 100 employees gets a contract to develop a new information system for bus stops in a city. The bus operator pays for the software development and will then own the system, as part of their contract with the system. The users of the application will be the persons taking the bus, but also some of the employees of the bus operator. The development team consists of three developers, which do the programming of the backend, the monitors at the bus stops and integrate and update code for a mobile application. The product owner is also employed at ABC software, but is responsible for several products and keeps contact with the bus operator. In ABC software, the role of the project manager is also fulfilled by the product owner, but for the product owner this feels like a different task and has sometimes troubles of keeping the two apart, which is a bit stressful.