Distribution responsibilities for code of long-living large project

Question

Suppose you are project manager of large project with a lot of code which was developed for long time. For some parts of code team have knowledge, for others - not.

It is good to distribute responsibility between team mates in some wise way. There are no problems with the code the author of which is still in the team. But the approach should be developed to avoid long decision making to appoint the person every time old code should be modified. This can lead to long discussions and spending a lot of time.

Which approaches, hints, techniques, processes could you suggest to make procedure of assigning code without responsibility to new team in efficient, transparent and reasonable way?

I would like to add that I don't try to make all developers know all parts of projects for now, just only cover all areas of code by responsible persons.

Answer 1

Even though you have specifically stated that you don't want to propagate all the knowledge in the whole team, I would strongly recommend that. Or at least, avoid having just one person be aware of what's going on on some module.

Perhaps you can try to resemble sub-teams for some area codes. For instance: "Lucas, Laura & John own module X; Florian and Julia own module Z, etc.". The more people share knowledge, the better. You will see soon a boost in quality. Moreover, you can assign a single point of contact for each sub-team to smooth communications (however, don't let him be the "boss"... they all should see themselves as peers, and feel this way; rotate this role weekly if you need to).

If this is not possible, at least try to form pairs. So, if someone leaves or gets sick, you'll always have a "backup".