Does your project have Code Ownership Culture?
Code Ownership is a well known term in software development. Depending on how you define it, it may be a good thing or bad. When a developer sees code-ownership as him/her owning a piece of codebase that only he/she understands enough to make changes, it is generally a bad thing. It is only when everybody is free to modify the code with a sense of responsibility that he/she should leave the code cleaner than how they found it, it is a good thing. In my view, code-ownership is a good thing when viewed as a responsibilty as opposed to a right. I view it as a Collective Code Ownership where code is not owned by a single person or pair but is owned by an entire team.
So, the question is: How to determine if your project/organization has that collective code ownership culture. And what team members (including managers 
) can do to create/encourage it.
Does your project have collective code ownership?
Here are few things you may want to ask yourself to determine if your organization/project has collective ownership culture.
Last week I presented at Agile 2009 a workshop for those new to Agile entitled: