Is there such thing like a "refactoring/maintainability group" role in software companies?
- by dukeofgaming
So, I work in a company that does embedded software development, other groups focus in the core development of different products' software and my department (which is in another geographical location) which is located at the factory has to deal with software development as well, but across all products, so that we can also fix things quicker when the lines go down due to software problems with the product.
In other words, we are generalists while other groups specialize on each product.
Thing is, it is kind of hard to get involved in core development when you are distributed geographically (well, I know it really isn't that hard, but there might be unintended cultural/political barriers when it comes to the discipline of collaborating remotely).
So I figured that, since we are currently just putting fires out and somewhat being idle/sub-utilized (even though we are a new department, or maybe that is the reason), I thought that a good role for us could be detecting areas of opportunity of refactoring and rearchitecting code and all other implementations that might have to do with stewarding maintainability and modularity. Other groups aren't focused on this because they don't have the time and they have aggressive deadlines, which damage the quality of the code (eternal story of software projects)
The thing is that I want my group/department to be recognized by management and other groups with this role officially, and I'm having trouble to come up with a good definition/identity of our group for this matter.
So my question is: is this role something that already exists?, or am I the first one to make something like this up?
