Adopting InnerSource

Chapter 8. Adopting InnerSource

We hope that the case studies in this book have given you some inspiration to start an InnerSource experiment at your organization. As should be clear by now, each InnerSource program is unique, and what might work for some companies may not work for yours. Some of the case studies will seem a better fit with your organization than others. But while we recognize there is great variety in how InnerSource is adopted, we can also see great similarities.

Indeed, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, the InnerSource Commons (ISC) has a dedicated working group striving to extract the similarities among approaches and capture them as patterns, much like the software engineering community has done for years with design patterns. The ISC’s patterns community has regular meetings to discuss new patterns, which they document in public.

Although we don’t present any patterns in this final chapter, we do offer you some guidance based on the lessons learned in the case studies. We’ll present a comparative analysis of the five case studies in order to extract some commonalities and differences.

This chapter will also attempt to give you some practical advice about how to bootstrap your first InnerSource experiment. There are many resources available to support you at http://InnerSourceCommons.org as well, and using the pointers given in this chapter you should be able to get started.

As we mentioned before, InnerSource isn’t a defined method like, for example, Scrum, ...