3. Innersourcing

The previous chapter discussed opensourcing, whereby the development and maintenance of a software product is “outsourced” to an open source community. As noted above, open source communities have developed a number of highly successful software products despite their seeming defiance of traditional software engineering wisdom. Starting in the late nineties, a number of organizations have begun to investigate how they could reproduce such success within their boundaries by adopting open source development practices for their in-house software development. This phenomenon has been termed ‘Inner Source.’ Most of these inner source cases started as grass-roots initiatives, initiated by one or a few key individuals within these organizations. Since then, numerous organizations have embarked on inner source initiatives, including Ericsson, Samsung, and Sony Mobile. In this chapter we discuss and illustrate inner-sourcing with two case studies. This chapter draws on studies reported by Stol et al. (2014, 2015) and uses a set of nine cues (in the original publications, these were referred to as ‘key factors’) to consider in inner source initiatives. The studies presented in this chapter involved qualitative data gathered through a number of interviews with key participants of these initiatives. Further details on the methodology are reported by Stol et al. (2014). This chapter is organized as follows. Sect. 3.1 introduces the case studies. Sects. 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 present the nine cues for inner source pertaining to the software product, practices and tools, and organization and community, respectively. Sect. 3.5 summarizes these nine cues. Sect. 3.6 concludes the chapter by discussing a number of implications for further research and practice.