Move Responsibilities

This organization can be improved by redistributing some of the responsibilities of Coder at the bottom center.

Context:

Any organization or process.

Forces:

You want cohesive roles.

You want cohesive organizations.

De-coupled organizations are more important than cohesive roles.

There may be fundamental trade-offs between coupling and cohesion.

Moving an entire role from one process or organization to another doesn't reduce the overall coupling, but only moves the source.

Solution:

Move responsibilities from the role that creates the most undesirable coupling, to the roles coupled to it from other processes. Simply said, this is load balancing. The responsibilities should not be shifted arbitrarily; a chief programmer team organization is one good way to implement this pattern (in the context for Developer role responsibilities).

Resulting Context:

The new process may exhibit more highly de-coupled groups. It is important to ba lance group cohesion with the de-coupling, so this pattern must be applied with care. For example, the Developer role is often the locus for a large fraction of project responsibilities, so the role appears overloaded. Arbitrarily shifting Developer responsibilities to other roles can introduce communication overhead. A chief programmer team approach to the solution helps balance these forces.

Buffalo Mountain is an alternative load-balancing pattern.

Design Rationale:

Most of the design rationale follows from the forces themselves. This is isomorphic to Mackenzie's model that task interdependencies, together with the interdependencies of task resources and their characteristics, define project roles [Mackenzie].

Next: Buffalo Mountain