No Code Ownership
One of the practices of Extreme Programming (see Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change [BA04]) is collective code ownership, in which every team member is responsible for all the code. In particular, anyone can fix any bug anywhere in the code without necessarily liaising with the original author.
The popularity (notoriety?) of XP has led to a number of teams adopting the practice, not always within an XP framework. This can lead to problems. Collective code ownership can work extremely effectively, but applied incorrectly, it can easily degenerate into a situation in which there is no code ownership. Anyone can change anything they want at any time, leading to poor quality and even thrashing, in which code is refactored ...
Get Debug It! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
