The Class Owner are developers who work as members of small development teams under the guidance of a Chief Programmer
to design, code, test and document the features required by the new software system. Class Owner come in two
stereotypical flavors a myriad of shades in between; they are often talented developers who, with more experience, will
become able to play Chief Programmers roles in the future or are talented developers who are content to be master
programmers and want nothing to do with leading or managing other people.
The Class owner is someone responsible for the design and implementation of a class. We find this works very
effectively. First, developers gain a sense of ownership of some part of the code, and we find pride of ownership a
good and motivating force. Second, it brings local consistency to a class (just one programmer touches the code). The
norm is one class, one class owner. Occasionally, for a class with algorithmically complex methods, you might need one
class, one class owner, and one algorithm programmer. Yet FDD organizes activities by feature, not by class. As it
should. After all, FDD is all about producing frequent, tangible, working results—small, client-value features! Clients
use features. They do not use the organizational framework that developers use to implement little pieces of a feature.
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