Code ownership

Martin Fowler writes about code ownership and I agree with him – strong code ownership is horrible to work with. It’s all over the place here at work, and it makes it tedious like hell to try to push through any kind of change.

Luckily it’s somewhat better in some areas where it’s a mix of strong and weak code ownership. Though ask-before-doing-any-kind-of-change is still the customary way of working, which is distracting when you are there, in the zone getting lots of work done. I tried to get our configuration manager interested in cvs commit mailing lists but to no avail. That would have made it easier to monitor changes to a module and maybe more acceptable to make changes before getting permission to do so.