Extreme programming practices: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:37, 12 December 2020

Revision as of 11:59, 2 October 2021

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=== Collective code ownership ===

Collective code ownership (also known as "team code ownership" and "shared code") means that everyone is responsible for all the code; therefore, everybody is allowed to change any part of the code. Collective code ownership is not only an organizational policy but also a feeling. "Developers feel team code ownership more when they understand the system context, have contributed to the code in question, perceive code quality as high, believe the product will satisfy the user needs, and perceive high team cohesion."<ref>{{cite webbook|last1=Sedano|first1=Todd|last2=Ralph|first2=Paul|last3=Péraire|first3=Cécile|title=Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering|chapter=Practice and Perception of Team Code Ownership|year=2016|pages=1–6|chapter-url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2915970.2916002|publisher=ACM|doi=10.1145/2915970.2916002|isbn=9781450336918|s2cid=10016345}}</ref> Pair programming, especially overlapping pair rotation, contributes to this practice: by working in different pairs, programmers better understand the system context and contribute to more areas of the code base.

Collective code ownership may accelerate development because a developer who spots an error can fix it immediately, which can reduce bugs overall. However, programmers may also introduce bugs when changing code that they do not understand well. Sufficiently well-defined unit tests should mitigate this problem: if unforeseen dependencies create errors, then when unit tests are run, they will show failures.