We are pleased to announce that we are writing a book about inner source.
We have been collaborating for some months with companies that are developing this methodology to produce the software they need. They were pioneers who early on realized that inner source has lots of benefits for talent management, software development, and business improvement. And now others are asking us for advice about implementing inner source.
So we have decided to bring together all our knowledge about inner source, share it and ask for open collaborations. We want to do this as openly as possible. We are building it as a GitBook, posting each chapter and asking for reviews. We will announce each part on our blog. So stay tuned and don’t miss a thing!
Our first chapter: What, When and How to Measure Inner Source.
The first chapter we’ve written is, of course, about metrics.
Choosing the right software metrics is not easy. If you have access to data, and in software development a lot of data can be gathered, you can easily think of lots of possible metrics. Sometimes too many… up to the point where you get overloaded!
As inner source is a medium or long term activity, like any new methodology to be used in a company it needs feedback about process and performance to assure its quality. This report is designed to be the glue between developers, managers, and C-level.
As inner source has a different meaning depending on the organization where it is deployed, inner source may have different goals. However, there are some goals that are usually required across organizations and that can be divided into these main groups:
- Improve code quality through continuous integration (CI)
- Decrease time-to-market
- Allow innovation within developers
- Reduce development and maintenance costs
- Increase motivation by allowing developers to work on the topics they feel are important for the organization or on their own interests to help them be more comfortable
This is just a brief overview of the chapter, but we want you to get involved and be part of this project. Here you have the entire chapter where we can discuss and create.
Come on! Join us!