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Collective Ownership (as anti-pattern)

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Summary

System modules are developed in quasi-equal measure by many developers. Therefore no-one has the responsibility for and complete understanding of the module’s functionality and implementation details. This makes precise, systematic and maintainable changes harder or even impossible.

Symptoms

• a given larger logical piece of code (e.g., module) has no designated owner or main contributor
• module code (+ associated artefacts, e.g. documentation) is frequently modified by several people to a similar extent
• changes by other developers are integrated and committed but not approved, verified or documented by someone prior to the commit
• (maybe?) tickets related to the module’s functionality are assigned/resolved and-or verified/closed by several people with similar occurence ratio

  Specific To

  projects using Agile methodologies

  Related Anti-patterns

  Sources

  mirror anti-pattern to (violation of) the Code Ownership organizational pattern from [COP’04]

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