I’ve recently been sucked back into the world of Java to work on a fairly agile-friendly project. We’ve got 2-day iterations going on and quite a lot of communication. Despite a severe lack of testing – which i’m working on – all seems well. But i’ve noticed a habit that bugs me a little. We’re meant to be passing this code off to some other teams and as such are trying our best to keep it clean and well javadoc’d for those that follow us. The problem i have with this is a simple little tag that Eclipse likes to throw in whenever you start a javadoc comment for a class; that tag is @author. I can’t stand the little bastard. We’re a team – we’ve all ripped at the guts of this code and if we’re anywhere near as agile as we aim to be then ownership of code shouldn’t matter. I’m aware this this auto-generated tag doesn’t really mean much but its mere existence irks me.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the Tacate truck it is actually related. As the old coding parable says: “how many developers could be hit by the beer truck and the project still survive?”. Figured it’d be fitting since i was ranting about the topic of code ownership.
I think the @author tag is a good idea considering the alternative of it not being there at all. I’ve inherited code that I had no idea who wrote it, if that tag were there I’d at least have a name or URL to contact that person if needed.
You could try setting that tag to be the name of the team you are working on.