Roles in agile software development teams

One of the key elements in describing a software development method is the roles that are assigned to the members of the software team. This article describes our experience in assigning roles to students who are involved in the development of software projects, working in Extreme Programming teams. This experience, which is based on 25 such projects, teaches us that a personal role for each teammate increases personal responsibility while maintaining the essence of the software development method. In this paper we discuss ways in which different software development methods address the place of roles in a software development team. We also share our experience in refining role specifications and suggest a way to achieve and measure progress by using the perspective of the different roles.