From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,2afac1a4161c7f35 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) Subject: Re: who owns the code? was Re: Distinguishing type names from other identifiers Date: 1998/01/23 Message-ID: <6a9s5f$2p1$1@news.nyu.edu>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 318570206 References: <6a8mir$caa@nn X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.nyu.edu X-Trace: news.nyu.edu 885552111 2849 (None) 128.122.140.194 Organization: New York University Ultracomputer Research Lab Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-01-23T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <6a8vgd$cr7@nntp1.erinet.com> jhopper@erinet.com (James Hopper) writes: >I think this is the crux of my difference with you robert. I would >probably agree that a team is composed of smaller subgroups who >specialize (as oposed to own) an area of the problem domain. Your >description up to now kind of gave me the impression that you were >advocating anyone could at any time work on anything, if no one owns it >than no one controls it i guess is my thinking. The key here is *could*: "could work on anything". That does not mean that, in practice, people in fact *do* work on anything. I'm probably the most specificialized person in the GNAT team: I work on GCC and the interface between the GNAT front end and GCC (Gigi). I don't know the front end (or even the Ada language) very well. Many bugs initially go to me, since it's Gigi that complains about errors in the tree generated by the front end. My normal procedure is to "interpret" the complaint and let people more familiar with the front end fix it. But once in a while if it looks like a simple fix and I feel comfortable doing it, I'll fix the bug in the front end. As another example, we recently added a new validity test in Gigi and found that a large number of our regression tests produced trees that were now "invalid". These all represented bugs in the front end, but since I was, at that moment, one of the people most familiar with the issue, I fixed these myself, even though it meant a couple of dozen changes in front end files, which I don't normally touch. The point is that, in doing these things, I didn't need anybody's "permission" or have to be at all concerned that somebody would be at all upset that I did these things. In each case, everybody was pleased they didn't have to do this. All that was required was for me to feel that I had sufficient comfort with the code I changed to do so cleanly, and that all the regression tests passed. As Robert said, this sort of thing wont't work for everybody, but the main skill needed is the experience to know what you and don't know. This, however, is a nearly essential skill in technical work anyway, for both managers and engineers.