InnerSource - A way to spread the Open Source way / culture in organizations?
Hey @opensource, I’d like to share a bit about #InnerSource, it is the practice of adopting the open source practices and cultures for in-house software development and software-like projects.
If you are interested, there is a ton of material gathered by the community at https://innersourcecommons.org/
I’m currently working with this topic and I could not see a lot about in in the #Fediverse yet.
The issue I’ve seen in the workplace is they’ve tried to implement this in amongst an existing prevailing scrum/agile/waterfall-in-denial culture. They are almost totally misaligned as the scrum/agile culture tells you to focus on your sprint which means nobody’s got the time/mandate to go around poking at other code bases that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. Scrum masters still want you to have synchronous meetings whereas open source culture is more or less all async. None of it gels.
It’s funny (or depressing), because the original concept of agile is very well aligned with an open source/inner source philosophy.
The whole premise of a sprint is supposed to be that you move quickly and with purpose for a short period of time, and then you stop and refactor and work on your tools or whatever other “non value-add” stuff tends to be neglected by conventional deliverable-focused processes.
The term “sprint” is supposed to make it clear that it’s not a sustainable 100%-of-the-time every-single-day pace. It’s one mode of many.
Buuuut that’s not how it turned out, is it?
> it’s not a sustainable 100%-of-the-time every-single-day pace
The agile manifesto seems to disagree with you:
> Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
And it has some answers for the development of tools and refactoring as well.
The process is supposed to be sustainable. That doesn’t mean you can take one activity and do it to the exclusion of all others and have that be sustainable.
Edit:
Also, regretably, I’m using the now-common framing where “agile” === Scrum.
If we wanna get pure about it, the manifesto doesn’t say anything about sprints. (And also, you don’t do agile… you do a process which is agile. It’s a set of criteria to measure a process against, not a process itself.)
And reasonable people can definitely assert that Scrum does not meet all the criteria in the agile manifesto — at least, as Scrum is usually practiced.
@CapriciousDay yup, that’s something that needs to be addressed and it is a more fundamental issue. If employees are not given enough empowerment, than cross-team collaboration and innovation suffers for sure. Nevertheless I think it is possible to have this together with scrum and other agile methodologies, as long as some capacity is reserved for this type of activity that requires empowerment.
And contributions to codebases that have developed with the goal of meeting the team’s own needs, and who similarly don’t have the time or space to refactor or review as needed to enable effective contributions.
Enabling Innersource will be a priority for management for only two weeks, anyway, before they focus on something else. And if it even makes it into measurable goals, it will probably be gamed so it doesn’t ruin bonuses.
Do you also work for $GenericMultinationalCompany, per-chance? Do you also know $BillFromFinance?
@jbloggs777 @CapriciousDay Those problems are real for sure, but on the other hand, we also have open source enthusiasts working on such companies, and having InnerSource as a well defined practice in the industry could give them at least some “ammunition” to bring the open source culture and practices to their organization.
I think the issue is that whatever “empowering” process you try to convince executives of, they will inevitably implement the form of it which gives them the most power which usually means overhead for development teams. Unfortunately it’s one of these things where if you really want to empower developers, you have to give them ownership. Not metaphorical ownership, but literal ownership of the company.
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I’ll just say: I don’t know what it is they teach in MBAs but whatever it is, it clearly has no bearing on critically understanding business line processes.
