Code Ownership in Organizations: Policy, Practice, and Common Problems

My technical and STS research are closely coupled, both examining the relationship between code quality and code ownership in organizations. Between June and August of 2022, as a software engineering intern at Appian Corporation, I helped to develop an application that tracked and assessed both code ownership and code quality across the company’s codebase. This work inspired my STS research, which examined different code ownership strategies, their benefits, and their drawbacks. Having only observed code ownership practices at a single company, I was curious to see how code ownership policies differed in other organizations.