The project manager said, that is not your role, stay in your lane. I held my tongue. But it struck me that I no longer understand the fixation on roles.

While developing software, we must make certain choices. Some of these choices are expensive to change if you get them wrong. These choices constitute architecture. See Grady Booch. Architectural decisions must happen. How does it matter who makes these decisions, as long as they know what they are doing? We need Architecture. We don’t need Architects.

The same argument applies to other work. We need business analysis, we don’t need business analysts. We need testing, we don’t need testers. You catch the drift.

If one person can do business analysis, and solution design, why not let them do it? If one person can write code and test, why not let them do it? With each fewer person in the team, you avoid an information hop. With each fewer information hop, you avoid some information loss.

Here is another argument. A designer must know the business that she creates solutions for. Why not let her learn the business first hand? Let her do the business analysis. A developer, makes better choices in the code, when he knows the essential business. Why not let the developer talk to the business? If the developer has the necessary skills, drop the middle man. Knowing what Agile has taught us, do you still want a developer that cannot test? Let the developers test; eliminate a whole moving part in pipeline.

If one person can do a job, why would you want three? If three people can do a job, why would you want six?