Shared code – pride, team ownership and easily understood

Technical debt was a term coined by Ward Cunningham to dealing with the financial debt when implementing systems. It typically has resulted because of traditional thinking in system design as something that is orchestrated, played and then organizations move on. One of the key changes for organizations is to see the development of systems as choreography that is continuing to be improved and extended in any direction.

Transformation can begin by seeing code as ‘collective code ownership’. Martin Fowler describes is as the entire team, and anyone, can make changes anywhere. Extreme programming introduced shared code. Consider your definition of done to include that code should be —

1. Able to be read by many

2. Done in small enough components to avoid impacting others

3. Accountability is with the team so if there is a break, there are many people that can jump in to fix it

Agile Manifesto – Collective Code Ownership

Test / Validate your success by not allowing the person that wrote the code to code for the next iteration. As business leaders, it is valuing sustainability of your systems and speed of delivery, over time. As product owner, it is showcasing the value of sustainable systems V. short-term gains with each iteration.

By instilling pride of ownership and team accountability, you begin to change the conversation. You open conversations around technical debt and determining how to sustain low maintenance costs to keep your roadmap moving but never leaving behind a piece of code that can only be refined by the person that wrote it.

By keeping it scalable, then you can take the organization in many directions rather than one-set path. Change the conversation to be pride and accountability. Be willing to push back and negotiate to maintain the values of the team.