Ownership

People see ownership in a very narrow way. For the backend team, ownership is the backend code. For the frontend team, ownership is the frontend code. Such views are limiting and lead to suboptimal outcomes and big trouble.

Lack of ownership is a big problem at scale, due to the Team Erosion phenomenon. Ownership is not just about direct code, but also database schemas, infrastructure like SQS queues, Lambda functions, Terraform scripts, Configuration, Jenkins jobs, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, wiki pages and many other tech assets. Ownership matters so much that there are languages built around such concepts like Rust. Usually teams lose track of what they have. People come and go, then you have a lot of "alien orphan" assets that nobody maintains.

Tags can help. But AI can help even more. AI can scan git repositories and suggest the most likely probable owners based on commit history, code reviews, comments, etc. AI can also help identify orphan assets and suggest potential owners based on historical data. This way, teams can maintain better ownership and accountability over their tech assets, reducing the risk of team erosion and improving overall system reliability.

Internal Shared Libraries are always a big problem, for ownership even more. Now with AI not only can we easily find owners but we can migrate away from problematic shared technology that has ownership issues.