Key Concept: Role
Topics: Role
Role 
One of the most central concepts in the Rational Unified Process® is the role. A role defines the behavior and responsibilities of an individual, or a set of individuals working together as a team, within the context of a software engineering organization. The Roles Overview provides additional information on roles.
The organization of roles and their activities in the treebrowser
Note that roles are not individuals; instead, they describe how individuals should behave in the business and the responsibilities of an individual. Individual members of the software development organization will wear different hats, or perform different roles. The mapping from individual to role, performed by the project manager when planning and staffing the project (see Activity: Acquire Staff), allows different individuals to act as several different roles, and for a role to be played by several individuals.
