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The part abou collective code ownership hits way too close to home. I've probably spent more time fixing existing functionality broken by others recklessly impl

The part abou collective code ownership hits way too close to home. I've probably spent more time fixing existing functionality broken by others recklessly implementing new functionality than implementing anything new myself. Guess what looks better to management though?

eeZah7Ux 10y ago
> Guess what looks better to management though? Spot on. Not to mention all the future debugging time you saved by deleting code.
wccrawford 10y ago
I had a job like this. Nobody wanted to do bug fixes except me. I was happy taking on that responsibility, and I was good at it, so I volunteered. I took on fewer Scrum tickets than others because I was partially allocated to bugfixes. I think it's coincidence, but that was around the same year I stopped getting good raises there. I quit after a couple years of that and went to get get paid what I'm worth. I still think it's because the new IT boss didn't like me. I was the only one that would stand up and say when a new policy was stupid. Still, I can no longer rule out the bug-fix thing, after reading your comment.
clintonb 10y ago
I see your point. What does your test suite look like? Are tests run before pull requests are merged? Automated testing, and gating merges on tests passing, would push the responsibility back to those breaking functionality.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  Historically, plenty of projects have worked fine without 100% test coverage and lots of CI infrastructure. If you're saying that collective code ownership requires these things just to work at all, that sounds like a fairly powerful argument against collective code ownership.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Historically, plenty of projects had bugs in them for years without anyone noticing. I've come across situations were I've been modifying and rewriting stuff and found that clients have been under billed for a decade costing many millions of dollars.
    - dasmoth 10y ago
      Are you positive that the clients would have remained clients if they'd been billed "correctly"? I have trouble getting excited about "X has been broken for years" except in pretty special cases, e.g. code paths that only get exercised when your Mars lander is about to touch down.

eeZah7Ux 10y ago

> Guess what looks better to management though? Spot on. Not to mention all the future debugging time you saved by deleting code.

wccrawford 10y ago

I had a job like this. Nobody wanted to do bug fixes except me. I was happy taking on that responsibility, and I was good at it, so I volunteered. I took on fewer Scrum tickets than others because I was partially allocated to bugfixes. I think it's coincidence, but that was around the same year I stopped getting good raises there. I quit after a couple years of that and went to get get paid what I'm worth. I still think it's because the new IT boss didn't like me. I was the only one that would stand up and say when a new policy was stupid. Still, I can no longer rule out the bug-fix thing, after reading your comment.

clintonb 10y ago

I see your point. What does your test suite look like? Are tests run before pull requests are merged? Automated testing, and gating merges on tests passing, would push the responsibility back to those breaking functionality.

dasmoth 10y ago
Historically, plenty of projects have worked fine without 100% test coverage and lots of CI infrastructure. If you're saying that collective code ownership requires these things just to work at all, that sounds like a fairly powerful argument against collective code ownership.
- flukus 10y ago
  Historically, plenty of projects had bugs in them for years without anyone noticing. I've come across situations were I've been modifying and rewriting stuff and found that clients have been under billed for a decade costing many millions of dollars.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    Are you positive that the clients would have remained clients if they'd been billed "correctly"? I have trouble getting excited about "X has been broken for years" except in pretty special cases, e.g. code paths that only get exercised when your Mars lander is about to touch down.