CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2007/wiki3 9 pp

Collective Ownership and Continuous Integration

Question:Two of the important Agile methodologies that we have not said much about in this course are collective ownership and continuous integration. What are the best definitions or examples you can find? Are these widely practiced? Are they controversial? Are there adherents of other design methodologies who consider them harmful? Investigate, through the Web and through the ACM DL.

What is Collective Ownership?

Collective code ownership means that everybody is responsible for all the code; this, in turn, means that everybody is allowed to change any part of the code. Pair programming contributes to this practice: by working in different pairs, all the programmers get to see all the parts of the code.

Advantages

• A major advantage claimed for collective ownership is that it speeds up the development process, because if an error occurs in the code any programmer may fix it.

• If you run across some code that could be improved, you have to stop and improve it, no matter what. The short term benefit is that your code is cleaner. The long term benefit is that the whole system gets better all the time, and everyone tends to be familiar with most of the system. Collective Code Ownership makes refactoring work better by exposing the team to more opportunities for big refactorings.

Disadvantages

• By giving every programmer the right to change the code, there is risk of errors being introduced by programmers who think they know what they are doing, but do not foresee certain dependencies