Software house

A software house is a company whose primary products are software, i.e. a company in the software industry.

There are a number of different types of software houses:

All of these may be categorized in one or many of the following:

Organizing a software house is very specialized type of management skill, where experienced persons can turn the organizational problem into a unique benefit. For example, having sub-teams spread in different time zones may allow a 24-hour company working day, if the teams, systems and procedures are well established. A good example is the test team in time zone 8 hours ahead or behind the development team, who fix software bugs found by the testers.

A professional software house normally consists of at least three dedicated sub-teams :

In bigger software houses, greater specialization is employed, and quite often there are also:

The manager of a software house is usually called the Head Of Development (HOD), and reports to the stakeholders. He or she leads the sub-teams directly or via the managers/leaders depending on the size of the organization. Usually teams of up to 10 person are the most operational. In bigger organizations, there are in general two models of the hierarchy:

All the teams are fully independent and they work separately on the different projects. The structure is quite simple and all the employees reports to one person, what make the situation quite clear however it is not a good solution in terms of knowledge exchange and optimal usage of human resources.

In this model there are dedicated managers/leaders for each main specialization, "renting" their people for particular projects led by product/project managers, who formally or informally buy the people and pay for their time. This leads to each private employee having two bosses – the product/project manager and the specialized "resource" manager. On one hand it optimizes the usage of human resources, on the other hand it may give rise to conflicts about which one manager has priority in the structure.

There are also a number of variants of these structures, and a number of organizations have this structure spread and split within various departments and units.

Software house may use a number of various methodologies to produce the code. These can include:

There are also some methodologies which combine both, such as the spiral model, Rational Unified Process (RUP) or MSF.

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