Code Owner Rules: Managing Module Ownership and Review Responsibilities

With increasing business complexity, it is common for a single developer to work on multiple modules or for multiple developers to collaborate on the same module. In this situation, maintaining quality and long‑term development is challenging, and the Code Owner Rules practice offers a simple yet effective solution.

Code Owner Rules involve setting an owner (or multiple owners) for each relevant module or directory in the codebase. The owner of a parent directory automatically becomes the owner of all its sub‑directories unless explicitly excluded using exclusion syntax.

Owner responsibilities and authority:

Owners are the ultimate custodians of their code modules, bearing final responsibility for code quality and module development.

Owners have decisive authority over design and modifications; when a merge request (MR) author and owner disagree, the owner’s decision prevails.

Owners must review the MR for their module; an MR cannot be merged without the owner’s approval.

Owners should provide feedback within 24 hours; if unavailable, they may delegate the review to another owner.

OWNERS file format

Each directory contains an OWNERS file where each line represents an owner, identified by a corporate user ID. Comments start with “# ” and can indicate different permissions.

Example:

# zhangsan负责review话题相关MR
zhangsan
wangwu
lisi # 负责review微服务相关MR
Dividwu
joehui