Role: Tool Specialist
This role supports the tools used by the project and provides technical assistance to the project. This includes selecting and acquiring tools, configuring and setting them up, and verifying that they work.
Role Sets: Environment
Relationships
Main Description

Among other responsibilities, this role is responsible for providing technical assistance to the project from code delivery to preparation roadmap stage. It brings unique knowledge of how to use automated tools to perform code analysis. Unique skill and expertise is required to provide key indicators and reports in a best usable form to solution architect and legacy expert. This role also demands an ability to suggest the best technical plan to the project manager, solution architect and legacy expert for the assessment project.

Staffing
Skills

An individual playing this role needs to have a broad set of skills. This includes an understanding of the underlying processes used by the project, and for this training might be required prior to project startup. General systematic analysis skills are beneficial when comparing and selecting tools for the project. Knowledge of the development platform(s) is required, on networking issues in particular. A person acting as this role also needs good communication skills and a 'service-minded' attitude, since she or he is likely to be a support contact point for the project members, on installation and other tool troubleshooting issues.

A person performing this role can have specialized skills in a particular technical area but needs to also have a broad understanding of all of the technologies involved to be able to work with other technical team members. This includes expertise and experience to define and create technical solutions in the project's technology; ability to understand and conform to the assessment goals, as well as to identify, build, and communicate assessment reports that cover behavior of the application environment; familiarity of the application environment and the technology used to build it; and programming skills to detect and correct issues with assessment tools.

Assignment Approaches

This role can be assigned in the following ways:

  • Assign one or more staff members to perform both this role and developer roles. This is a commonly adopted approach, especially in small-to-mid-sized teams, and capitalizes on the common development skills that developer role shares with this role.
  • Assign one staff member to perform this role only. This is a commonly adopted approach and is particularly suitable for large teams or smaller teams where effective tool support and process automation is a key aspect of the projects development plan.