The developer advocates for the development constituency in the MSF Team Model. The developer is responsible for the bulk of the work building the product. Other development roles such as the lead developer and development manager have additional communication and project management responsibilities. The developer should suffer a minimum of communication overhead allowing for a maximum effort on construction of code. In addition, during the early stages of a project, developers may be expected to help specify product requirements not included in the customer requirements and to work on analysis and architecture activities as part of a multi-disciplinary team.

A person assigned to this role should be added to the Contributor permissions group. This allows them to do all that they need to perform their function; such as create and modify the documents, work items, and work products.