Comparison
Code ownershipvsOrphaned service
Code ownership
you opened a pull request against another team's repository and it sat there for eleven days.
Who is accountable for a piece of code: reviewing changes, running it, and being paged when it breaks. Strong ownership makes quality and on-call clear and makes cross-team change slow; collective ownership makes change fast and quality diffuse. Neither is right in general, and the failure to state which one is in force is what produces both the eleven-day review and the directory nobody maintains.
Full entry →Orphaned service
the alert fired and it took forty minutes to establish which team was supposed to answer it.
A running system with no team accountable for it, usually left behind by a reorganisation or a departure. It is a compounding risk: it gets no upgrades, no security patches and no context, and the first person to touch it inherits it by accident. The cheap prevention is a service catalogue with a named owning team and a rule that anything unowned is a candidate for deletion.
Full entry →