Succeeding with Agile

Collective Ownership

Collective ownership refers to all developers feeling ownership over all artifacts of the development process, but especially of the code and automated tests. Because of the fast pace of a Scrum project, the team needs to avoid the trap of saying, “That’s Ted’s code. We can’t touch it.” Collective ownership encourages each team member to feel responsible for all parts of the program so that any programmer can work on any module of the program. When modifying a module, the programmer then shares responsibility for its quality with the module’s initial writer.

Collective ownership is not intended to cause a free-for-all in the coding. Programmers will still tend to have certain areas they specialize in and prefer to work in, ...