Regional small and medium business in IT - 3

Consider the principles of the modern organization of the development process, to a greater degree inherent in modern flexible (Agile) methodologies, than the "Waterfall" (Waterfall).

Perhaps, there will be a certain emphasis on criticism, but you should not dwell on it. Rather, this is a comparative review: each of the approaches has its pros and cons.
This post is a continuation of previous publications ( part 1 , part 2 ).

There are some questions about the distribution of authority in project management and the development process for such roles as analysts, project managers, architects, developers.
Here are some theses affecting the task of ensuring the quality of developed products that I would like to share.

1. Analysts create a domain model in their own terms, developers program it in their own (in one or another programming paradigm).
It is necessary that someone "built bridges" between the first and second.

These people are architects, and you need at least three types of architects:

• system architect as a whole (system architect, System Architect);
• software architect (software architect, Software Architect);
• database architect (DB Architect).

About what happens when this link is omitted, you can read in part 1 , paragraph 1.
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2. In the days of the “waterfall”, analysts, project managers, architects grew out of line specialists and heads of relevant departments, the best became task directors.

But - and this is extremely important - all these people remained profile specialists and leaders, i.e. were engaged in real work and knew what it was.
For example, the head of the department (or the chief engineer) could part-time hold the position of a project manager (project, and not projects, like modern PM).

3. In the current era of domination of flexible (Agile) technologies, although it is not directly related to them, this approach prevails:

• Analysts are those who could not become a developer, but they didn’t study analysts either (and where are they being taught now? They’re probably taught, but the process has only begun, and the current approach is already 10-15 years old).
• Developers have been assigned the role of “cheap coders”, respectively, they either cannot analyze analytics by their qualities, or they are not allowed to do so.
• And here we need the very architects mentioned above. Architects should connect the first and second, because they cannot do this on their own, in accordance with the role and quality of selected personnel determined by them.

4. So, the most interesting - and where are these architects?

As knowledgeable people explain, the dominant development model is chosen based on the cheaper development process, which is why cheap analysts and cheap coders are used.

“Dear architects” do not fit into this model. The very idea itself is correct: using a clearer division of roles (analysts - architects - coders), we get a better development process and a better result.

We get, if you do not throw out the key expensive link.
Usually this link is not (after all, the initial formulation of the problem is to make the process cheaper), and the result is appropriate.
According to my observations and estimates, in this case, for custom (non-part) development, the average lifetime of a project is 3 years.