Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#11

Post by mirceal » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

It's usually a bad idea to have code "owners". Yes, sometimes someone will know the most about a specific piece of code if either they wrote it or worked on it a lot. Sometimes people will not want to touch a piece of code.

My rule is that once you submit the code for review and it passes and gets merged everybody owns the code. Everybody.

The person who is modifying the code has the responsibility to identify the best reviewers (by looking at history, chatting with others, etc) to ensure high quality and understanding.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#12

Post by NickBusey » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #8

1. I don't say "guys", I say "folks" 2. Code is owned by teams of people and not individuals.

According to dictionary.com, the definition of "guys" is "persons of either sex; people"

The definition of "folks" is "people in general"

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#13

Post by tacostakohashi » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

In my experience with several big organizations (20,000+ employees), they tend to have a home-grown application to track ownership of resources (assets) - including source code (repositories), and servers, databases, scheduled jobs (in autosys or suchlike).

Generally each of these entities is grouped into some bucket for an application / "system" / business area, and then that bucket has a few owners assigned, and also other non-ownership roles assigned (developer role can check in code to those repos, prod support role can log into the servers owned by the bucket, etc).

It's generally heavily integrated with an LDAP directory, HR system to handle joiners and leavers, and also change management (Developers can only ssh to a production host during the change window of a change for that bucket).

These home-grown apps are generally old and clunky (written for IE6, with piecemeal improvements since then, that kind of thing), but hard to replace because they're integrated with so many other applications.

I tend to think that this would be a good opportunity for some (startup) to do a great job of this as an off-the-shelf product, with good integrations with Linux + Windows authentication, an API, nice web app, etc - it would be very easy to do better than the in-house systems filling this niche.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#14

Post by om3n » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

I work for a large global company, and my department is building a fairly large Angular application. My team "owns" the primary project and several shared component libraries, and other teams build features for this project.

These teams are from all over the world, and many of us have never worked closely before this project began.

When we first started the project, we decided to split the UI into feature projects which are packaged and referenced in the common project. Each team owns their own feature projects; however, everyone is welcome to contribute PRs to any of the projects.

Some of our projects are shared and maintained by many teams, but we always have one team that owns each project.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#15

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#16

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #5

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #2

At my current workplace, most top-level subdirectories in the source tree have a primary author. That person is (nominally) "owner" of that code. If they aren't the one making changes, they're almost always at least the one doing the code review. Bugs by default get routed to the person who wrote the code (presuming that we can tell which code the bug is in). If that person finds out the bug is somewhere else, the bu…

> Bugs by default get routed to the person who wrote the code... That was the root of some very toxic teams I've seen. Because it built a lack of shared ownership as a team, it inspired competition instead of cooperation, and people would just ignore problems because "it wasn't my code". Admittedly, that is a problem with the leadership that took the team to that place, but I'd be interested in hearing counter-exampl…

I hate that attitude. Especially if a bug is impacting something I am doing, I’ll just fix it myself and let them know.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#17

Post by breischl » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #11

It's usually a bad idea to have code "owners". Yes, sometimes someone will know the most about a specific piece of code if either they wrote it or worked on it a lot. Sometimes people will not want to touch a piece of code. My rule is that once you submit the code for review and it passes and gets merged everybody owns the code. Everybody. The person who is modifying the code has the responsibility to identify the be…

Some people have claimed that in my organization. I think that can work for library code, and particularly libraries that are used in many different places.

But once you're talking about a service, or code that is only used by one service, then you need to have an owner (or a team of owners). If you still think there's no owner, then ask yourself who is going to get woken up at 2AM when it breaks, and that's your owner.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#18

Post by breischl » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

NickBusey wrote: post #12

jgrahamc wrote: post #8

1. I don't say "guys", I say "folks" 2. Code is owned by teams of people and not individuals.

According to dictionary.com, the definition of "guys" is "persons of either sex; people" The definition of "folks" is "people in general" I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.

Dictionary definition aside, the colloquial meaning of "guys" is quite frequently "men". I think the GP was trying to be gender-neutral. I actually have tried to move to "folks" myself for that reason.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#19

Post by HeWhoLurksLate » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #13

In my experience with several big organizations (20,000+ employees), they tend to have a home-grown application to track ownership of resources (assets) - including source code (repositories), and servers, databases, scheduled jobs (in autosys or suchlike). Generally each of these entities is grouped into some bucket for an application / "system" / business area, and then that bucket has a few owners assigned, and al…

Does Git not provide this functionality? I'm curious.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle code ownership?

#20

Post by d4mi3n » Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

NickBusey wrote: post #12

jgrahamc wrote: post #8

1. I don't say "guys", I say "folks" 2. Code is owned by teams of people and not individuals.

According to dictionary.com, the definition of "guys" is "persons of either sex; people" The definition of "folks" is "people in general" I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.

There’s an ongoing debate on “guys” being non-inclusive. I don’t personally buy into it, but that doesn’t make it an invalid position. I generally recommend calling people what they want to be called and exercising common courtesy.