Here’s why I LOVE the @author annotation (in Javadoc comments): It makes me look really good having my name on tons of code. It shows that I am a high-output engineer.

Here’s why I HATE the @author annotation: It implies some sort of ownership of a method, class or package to the rest of the team.

When it comes to writing software, my experience has always been that smaller teams with good developers can get significantly more done than large teams with mediocre developers. (On this note, it may be a good idea to hire a single great developer at $150k rather than 3 junior programmers at $60k, but that’s a separate post).

The @author annotation can be very good to place in your javadoc comments so that others know who to turn to for questions about the code that was written. I’m not opposed to its use (in fact, I use it all the time). Its use, however, should not imply that others on the team are prohibited from modifying the code written by another programmer. On the contrary: Code is the responsibility of the entire team. All code!

There have been many occasions throughout my career wherein another developer said to me, “Hey Matt, can you write such-and-such a method so that I can get such-and-such?” An obvious example is in DAO classes. Another developer may be writing some controller code that requires some DAO method downstream. That developer should not find it necessary to ask the guy or gal who wrote the DAO class to implement a method. Write it yourself! Okay, there are certainly times when it may be appropriate to do so, but the main point is that we should make it clear that all code is the responsibility of everyone on the team.

Another example is when a defect is found. We’ve all made them… Writing code, to some extent, means writing defects. When a defect is found it is never appropriate to allow the rest of the team to be hung up because of it. The person discovering the defect, whether he or she wrote the defect or not, is free to correct it.

I’ll use myself as an example. One time I wrote a POJO class with a method like this:

getSTatus()

Oops! This is a pretty straightforward problem: That T should be lowercase. Because this was code that I checked in and my name appear as the @author, another team member pointed the typo out to me and asked me to correct the problem. This is certainly fair to do, but in the amount of time it took to call me over, show me the typo and send me to fix it, the other team member could have simply checked in a fix. That @author tag does not indicate that the @author is the only one allowed to modify any code.