What do you call those individuals in the room?

Being kind of new to software development, I'm really not into what you should address people as. What I've found by just scanning employment adds is, that Programmer seems to be a title that is not "hip". I guess you call those guys developers. Or has the role changed and the programmers are no more?

Then there are the architects. I've realized that they are better payed and that "other developers" (or real developers as the other developers sometimes call themselves) sees those guys as the ones who don't crank code but spend all their days in the meeting with "the other guys", or "the business people".

Then there are the project managers. They can be developers but most of them say something like "well, I still write some code on my free time", or they just pest people about filling out their time sheets and no little or nothing about coding. But they know all about making a plan looking really smart in Microsoft Project.

Then we have all those experts, they can be database experts or usability experts, security experts or experts on some system or product. That seems to mean that they think that their field of interest is the most crusial part of the project and the others simply have no clue.

In a agile software development project, all these guys have new titles and hopefully new roles.

And how do I address the guys? Well, I call them by their christian name. Their parents gave them those, and I hope they knew pretty well what works for them.

How about titles then? I love titles. If I'm out selling I can simply put the label of Security expert or head architect on each and every one of my team and present them as such. Because in a team of peers, all and everyone should be able to take that part. Then there are some who play the part a little better than the others, but we work on that too.

So, what am I? I cannot say. I'm so glad that we use scrum so I can set a word on what I'm doing. And since my pals are either hard core agile developers or in other fields of work (and simply not interested if my title doesn't signal free computer support) that often ends the discussion.