In your Understanding what is the scope of a Tool's Smith in Software Development?

Question

I've been asked to maintain a few of our software development tools; Clearcase (Views, Streams, Triggers), JIRA, Enterprise Architect and various document based repositories, Confluence, doku Wiki etc..

But as I wonder where does the line is when it comes to the "best practices" and cleanup efforts to make the most of these tools for development teams. for an SysAdmin perspective it's quite easy; Make sure u maintain the application, network and backup system. but when it's development support and in the term used "Tool's Smith" I believe is half way between a lead developer and system administrator.

Answer 1

If they wanted you to be a lead developer, they wouldn't have given you a title of "Tool Smith". I would view it as a specialized system administrator, more more to the point, application administrator. You might have some additional development responsibilities but being in charge of maintaining the tools probably doesn't confer any responsibility over how those tools are used.

Just my $0.02.

Answer 2

Basically I would view this as someone in charge of proposing a framework enabling the developer to not see those tools, but only the process he/she needs to follow:

• declare a new task (behind the scene: open a JIRA ticket)
• associate to a project (UCM snasphot view to a Stream, download the code)
• document the task (new page in the wiki)
• ...

The administration of those tools is still there, but a bit of development is needed to help the users (developers) in their daily process without them having constantly to think about the specificities of each tools.