Yes, we should have owners for code. I hate shared ownership ( "The WHOLE team owns the code !"). Quality happens when at most one person is responsible to make it happen. If there are two people responsible to make good quality software, each person will think that the other person will do the hard stuff.
Quality happens when people feel like they are allowed to invest the time to clean up. Telling someone they are an owner is one way to do that. Most companies base your performance only on new features, creating a culture of fear around refactoring ("I would love to refactor that, but it's not going to put any points on the board in Pivotal, so I'll just wait until some unspecified future day when the refactoring wil…
Well, what you measure improves.