Adopting InnerSource - Principles and Case Studies

Adopting Inner Source

InnerSource is a software development strategy rapidly spreading throughout large corporations - and it is also more. At its essence, InnerSource enables software 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.

In this book, Danese Cooper and Klaas-Jan Stol present a series of case studies at a range of companies to show when and why InnerSource may be useful to your organization. The case studies candidly discuss the difficulties of getting InnerSource projects started, along with the progress so far and the benefits or negative fallout.

In this book you can read about:

  • The principles of The Apache Way, on which InnerSource is based
  • One of the earliest known InnerSource projects at Bell Laboratories, the product of which is still widely used in a range of products
  • Robert Bosch’s experimental InnerSource program called BIOS, which has led to many innovative products
  • PayPal’s InnerSource program and how it led to a fantastic reduction in interrupts of engineers
  • Adoption of InnerSource at Europace, a medium-sized company in Germany operating in the financial services domain
  • Ericsson’s InnerSource program that helped to remove bottlenecks in its organization.

Finally, we provide a systematic comparison of the five case studies and offer a number of guidelines to start adopting InnerSource at your organization.