“Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.”
-Bjarne Stroustrup
For a month or so, I’ve been active coding in an open source project. My first task was to get the team going on writing unit tests and refactoring of the old code. As I was working and chatting with people in the project, something struck me – no one was speaking about code.
I had lots of questions on how things worked, and what were the “correct” ways of doing things in the project. It was hard to get answers, and most of the time, when I did get an answer, people told me in private, so as notto disturb the rest of the team.
Another thing that really surprised me was how people felt about the code they had written. Their sense of personal ownership is very strong, and some people think it’s bad form to change someone else’s code without asking for permission first.
In an open source project more than in a normal project, it’s essential to communicate well. New developers join the group all the time, and others leave the project. In a situation like this, the code needs to be known by more than one set of eyes. Also, you get very varied coding experience in a project like this. Having more experienced developers help the young ones lifts the developers, and removes some of the most common pitfalls.
Talking about code also makes you part of the creating process of code, which helps build a feeling of shared ownership of the code. With ownership also comes responsibility – when you find bugs, you fix them, instead of passing the bucket to someone else.
We are social animals and as such, we work best together. For a long time, I have known that I love working with computers, and I love working with people. For a long time, I thought that I had to choose one – working with computers meant not working with people. Now I’m starting to realiaze that this is just not true – coding and developing great software is much more about how I interact with people than how deep my knowledge of the C# syntax is.
What two know, the world know.
Left by Stefan on February 2nd, 2006