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“In my previous role, searching for a library or service’s owner involved looking at Google Sheets or maybe asking around in Slack channels that referred me to
by cudgy 4y ago
“In my previous role, searching for a library or service’s owner involved looking at Google Sheets or maybe asking around in Slack channels that referred me to other Slack channels. It took me sometimes one or more hours just to find an answer to a simple question about another team’s code.”
This assumes that there is an “owner” of the code, but code usually changes constantly with documentation drifting out of date as soon as the code is changed significantly. Seems like a product manager might have some of this information as part of a functional specification for the last major effort, but even this will be out of date quickly.
This whole problem is organizational in origin. A high level living document should be maintained, especially for APIs that are exposed to third parties. Lack of that document is the fault of management. Not sure how another tool solves that problem.
- scary-size 4y agoFrom what I experienced not a lot of code changes ownership over a period of years. Not saying code always stays at its place. But disagreeing that ownership „usually“ changes with code updates to the code. I do get on board that change in ownership is often a reflection organisational change. Change to often and things fall through the cracks.
- cudgy 4y agoI never meant that “ownership” necessarily changes when a small change is made like a game of hot potato. Usually, this is an ad hoc process where the person or people that performed the last major change or wrote the original version are considered to be the “owner” or at the least someone that may have insight into the code. However, typically developers need to accept the reality of figuring out the code on their own since the “owner” may no longer work at the company or they have no recollection of what they wrote 5 years ago.