Code Ownership

We need a collective and clear code ownership

The What

Code ownership is NOT one person who owns a codebase. Instead, it refers to how we collaborate on a shared codebase.

The How

Prerequisites

• The team owns the codebase

• The team works in an agile way

• The team embraces risk and learns from failure

• The team doesn’t have a heavy and prescriptive process

Create a supportive environment

• Recognise the assistance of other team members in achieving their goals

• Recognise the contributions to improve Dev Experience, even though it isn't visible

• Recognise the patience to tackle tech debt

• An appropriate level of autonomy

Narrow the ownership when appropriate

• In many cases, splitting ownership is not ideal, but it can help you tackle small, maintenance & repeated tasks. e.g.,

• Upgrade dependencies

• Approve PRs generated by Renovate

• Bake the duties in the development workflow

• Keep track of who owns what in a shared document

✅ Exceptions

• It only works on the known challenge with a certain solution

🔴 Red Flags

• Don’t go too far down the track

• Code ownership may demotivate the team

📜 Tips

• Recognise desirable behaviours, e.g., refactoring, patching, improving dev experience, tidying up, improving CI/CD pipelines, etc

• It's quite OK for product managers or stakeholders to be outcome-driven

• The tech lead should recognise the contributions made on the journey to their goal

🕳️ Pitfalls

• Simply establishing clear ownership will not help you build a high-performing team