On the nature of roles in software engineering

The extensive use of software and the ever increasing complexity of software development in today’s world requires a diversity of people from different domains to closely collaborate and create quality software. Unfortunately, a lack of clarity in the different types of roles in software engineering (SE), their diversity and the competencies required by people to perform the roles is a major problem not just for software but for the people involved in the entire process. The main intent of this paper is to discuss different kinds of roles in SE with an aim to understand the challenges of people performing roles from multiple perspectives. To this end, we propose an ontology based framework for modeling roles in SE, which could be adapted for different organizations, projects, domains, environments and even cultures. We discuss several ontologies of this framework (context, role, team, organization, process, competency, persona, history, domain) and conclude this paper with a few research directions.