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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Distinguishing type names from other identifiers
Date: 1998/01/18
Message-ID: <dewar.885126007@merv>#1/1
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Nasser says

<<Otherwise, it becomes programming by committe, no one is responsible for
any thing going wrong, becuase no one owns the code. If one part of the
software is not working, one can't hold any person responsible, this seems
to me to allow lazy and bad programmers to ride on the shoulder of better
programmers.
>>


The trouble is that if your view is that one particular person is
*the* person responsible for fixing a bug if it occurs in unit X, then
what if that person is on vacation, or suddenly leaves the company.
Inevitably this kind of ownership discourages others from learning
that code, or fixing it, and, as you note, taking responsibility for it.

My ideal of a project is that everyone takes responsibility for everything,
and that every part of the system has more than one person knowing it 
well enough to fix or modify things. Ideally testing procedures should
be set up to minimize the problem of introducing bugs into a system
but if someone *does* introduce a bug, then what should happen is that
they feel a strong sense of responsibility to the little community that
is the project they are involved in, and rush to fix the problem.

Furthermore, everyone needs to work together, so that if someone does
make a mistake, other people's reaction is to work to help sort it out,
rather than sit around being annoyed.

Creating a sense of community that achieves this ideal is not easy, but
it is definitely possible. Agreeing to a standard set of coding conventions
is just one element in acheiving this.

A good test for me is how the "owner" of unit A reacts if someone else
fixes a problem or makes a modification in unit A. All to often the
reaction is a defensive one ("what's this guy doing messing with my code?").
What you are aiming at is that the reaction is more like "great, thanks,
now I don't have to fix that bug myself".

Robert Dewar