Contributors and Facilitators

Your software is your product; but, it’s likely that not everyone on your team will be writing code. Not all tasks can be completed by committing a change to your version control.

Here we will define only two types of activities:

• Contributing change directly in version control
• Facilitating the engineering team

An individual might be purely a contributor or purely a facilitator. Many people will do both types of activities.

The Purpose of Facilitating

There are only two ways to help build your software product: contributing and facilitating. The focus of facilitation is to:

• Collect the voice of the customer, understand the product vision and produce the perfect items for the engineers to start implementation, just-in-time as the engineers are ready for more work
• Protect the engineer while they implement, handle external communications
• Confirm that the changes work and are an improvement moving towards the project’s goals

Pure facilitators can be the most important people on the team. Just because someone is not writing code does not mean that they are not contributing to the success of the software and the success of the team. But, emails and meetings do not make software, only contributing changes can make software. Therefore, any facilitation activities must be directed at eliminating bottle necks at the phases before and after the core implementation phase as well as protecting the engineering team from interruptions and context switching during the implementation phase.