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Adopting InnerSource: Principles and Case Studies
Abstract and Figures
InnerSource is a software development strategy rapidly spreading throughout large corporations—and it is also more. At its essence, InnerSource enables soft‐ ware developers to contribute to the efforts of other teams, fostering transparency and openness to contributions from others. But beyond that, InnerSource represents a collaborative and empowering way of involving employees in making and implementing decisions throughout the corporation. It embodies a philosophy of human relations, an approach to rewards and motivations, and a loose, adaptable set of tools and practices.
This book presents case studies at a range of companies to show when and why InnerSource may be useful to your organization. The case studies candidly dis‐ cuss the difficulties of getting InnerSource projects started, along with the progress so far and the benefits or negative fallout. We hope that readers will be inspired to advocate for InnerSource within their software development groups and organizations.
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... Inner source has been linked to increased software reuse, knowledge sharing, and product innovation (Capraro and Riehle, 2017;Morgan et al., 2011;Riehle et al., 2016;Vitharana et al., 2010). These output-oriented benefits to increase operational productivity have prompted a wide range of software organizations to consider adopting the open source development model internally (Cooper and Stol, 2018;Fitzgerald, 2011): including Bell Laboratories (Gurbani et al., 2006), HP (Dinkelacker et al., 2002;Melian and Mähring, 2008), Nokia (Lindman et al., 2008), Philips (Wesselius, 2008), and SAP (Riehle et al., 2009). While there is a considerable body of Information Systems (IS) literature that has focused on OSS, it has primarily considered only certain aspects of the OSS phenomenon, such as organizational adoption of OSS products (Marsan et al., 2012), OSS developers (Carillo et al., 2017;von Krogh et al., 2012), achieving business value with OSS (Morgan and Finnegan, 2014), and OSS project success (Sutanto et al., 2021). ...
... This, however, inevitably leads to dependencies, which in turn can lead to friction in the development process-and that in turn frequently leads to developer frustration (Stol et al., 2011). Inner source removes such constraints, allowing and encouraging developers to participate in projects that are of interest to them (Cooper and Stol, 2018;Riehle et al., 2009), or that they believe can resolve critical dependency bottlenecks (Stol et al., 2011). Hence, reducing friction and frustration through this process has the potential to increase job satisfaction. ...
... The relational dimension includes several aspects of relationships between people, such as trust, norms, and identification (Fukuyama, 1995;Wasko and Faraj, 2005). In the context of IS development teams, an essential attribute of emergent relationships is trust (Sarker et al., 2011), and prior work on inner source has emphasized a lack of trust between teams as an obstacle (Cooper and Stol, 2018;Riehle et al., 2016). For that reason, and following others (e.g., Ali-Hassan et al., 2015), we operationalize relational social capital as trust. ...
Internal boundaries between information systems divisions have traditionally caused friction and frustration, and negatively affected IT staff job satisfaction. Adopting open source development principles and processes within a corporate environment, what has been labeled 'inner source,' is now part of a larger management strategy to break down silos and promote innovation, collaboration , cooperation and communication across divisions of an organization. In this article we argue that inner source emphasizes the importance of relationships between developers and teams interacting across intra-organizational boundaries. We posit that inner source helps to create social capital, which in turn links to higher levels of job satisfaction. We use a sequential mixed-methods approach to test a theoretical model by combining quantitative survey data collected at one IT organization with qualitative data based on interviews with professionals from six organizations that adopted inner source. The results suggest that employees who participate in inner source projects develop more social interaction ties with others and have higher levels of shared understanding of software projects. Furthermore, we confirm that social interaction ties and a shared understanding link to a higher degree of trust. Finally, this study provides evidence that social capital mediates the link between participation in inner source and job satisfaction, implying that an inner source strategy can offer benefits to organizations. Enriched with the findings from the qualitative interviews, we then identify a number of implications for managers.
... • suggest to provide a software forge that serves as a starting point for finding IS projects (2) Provide single entrypoint to IS program). Software forges are widely used by practitioners (Cooper and Stol 2018). ...
Inner source (IS) is the use of open source software development practices and the establishment of open source-like communities within an organization. The organization may still develop proprietary software but internally opens up its development. IS promises to resolve problems of traditional software development by easing software reuse and enabling parties within an organization to collaborate across organizational boundaries. However, it is unclear what elements constitute IS (problem I) and how to measure the presence and magnitude of IS collaboration (problem II). The large majority of research articles on IS to date are limited to qualitative results regarding IS. There are yet no quantitative studies on IS collaboration exploring how much IS collaboration takes place or how IS practices affect it (problem III). We followed a three-phase research approach to address these problems. First, we performed an extensive literature survey and analyzed 43 IS publications. We found that four key elements constitute IS (shared cultural values, open development environment, communities around software, IS-specific scenarios) but that IS programs and projects differ on at least five dimensions (addressing problem I). Second, we developed the patch-flow method (and a software tool implementing it) for measuring IS collaboration. Patch-flow is the flow of code contributions across organizational boundaries ("silos") such as organizational unit or cost center boundaries. We evaluated the method using case study research with a non-trivial industry organization and found it to be viable and useful to practitioners (addressing problem II). Third, we performed a multiple-case case study with three large software organizations running a total of five IS program. We identified the used IS practices and the resulting patch-flow. We found patch-flow to exist in all organizations but that only fraction of all code contributions to IS projects constitute patch-flow. We observed that the number of IS practices implemented correlates with the distance of parties involved in collaboration. This indicates that IS is particularly suited to enable collaboration between parties of high distance in an organization (addressing problem III). This thesis delivers a holistic definition of IS and the first classification framework for IS programs and projects. Researchers can use such a framework to reason about generalizability of their results more precisely. The patch-flow measurement method is the first of its kind to measure and quantify IS collaboration and can serve as a base for further quantitative analyses of IS collaboration. The exploration of the patch-flow in the three industry cases can serve as example and benchmark for practitioners.
Inner source software development is the practice of using open source practices for firm-internal software development. Practitioner reports have shown that inner source can increase flexibility and reduce costs. Despite the potential benefits of inner source, there has been little research on its impact on businesses and their processes. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review that identified which business processes are affected by inner source development, particularly within the accounting and management domain. Our review revealed the need for new dedicated community building processes within companies. In addition, we examined computational tools and techniques that can be used to measure inner source development. We found that existing tools and techniques are insufficiently suitable to manage inner source processes. Based on this, we propose research topics for future work on quantifying inner source.
This article presents an ecosystem that Ericsson developed to systematically practice large-scale reuse of microservices in a cloud-native context. We discuss how various ecosystem aspects facilitated the development and reuse of microservices across Ericsson. We also share lessons learned while developing the ecosystem.
Gamification seeks to encourage behavior of participants by borrowing elements of games, such as scoring points. Few rigorous studies exist of gamification in software organizations, and several questions have remained unanswered, for example, what might drive developers to partake, and what are the consequences of developer engagement. This article seeks to provide some answers through a rigorous empirical study at one organization that created an internal gamification platform. We develop a theoretical model that seeks to explain why developers may participate, and develop the concept of developer engagement, which we link to job satisfaction. We collected data from two sources that were linked together: developer opinion data collected through a survey, and data from the organization's version control system. We test our theoretical model using structural equation modeling and moderation analysis, and find support for our model. These findings suggest that gamification can be an effective mechanism to engage developers within the organization, and that developer engagement is positively associated with job satisfaction, which is a key outcome that is of great interest to software organizations.
Traditional release strategies have a number of associated problems, which can be overcome by time-based release management. We present findings from interviews with key members of seven prominent volunteer-based open source projects, all of which have adopted a time-based release strategy. We discuss the importance of release planning, the numerous challenges that can result from a lack of such planning, and the benefits of time-based releases. Finally, we discuss how an open source project can adopt a time-based release strategy.