Ownership in the Hands of Accountability at Brightsquid -- A Case Study and a Developer Survey

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital health solutions. This has presented significant challenges for software development teams to swiftly adjust to the market need and demand. To address these challenges, product management teams have had to adapt their approach to software development, reshaping their processes to meet the demands of the pandemic. Brighsquid implemented a new task assignment process aimed at enhancing developer accountability toward the customer. To assess the impact of this change on code ownership, we conducted a code change analysis. Additionally, we surveyed 67 developers to investigate the relationship between accountability and ownership more broadly. The findings of our case study indicate that the revised assignment model not only increased the perceived sense of accountability within the production team but also improved code resilience against ownership changes. Moreover, the survey results revealed that a majority of the participating developers (67.5%) associated perceived accountability with artifact ownership.