Considerations for Open Development (aka Inner Source) from engineering management's perspective

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Open Development: An Engineering Manager’s Perspective
Michael Marth | Director Engineering

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Open Development (aka Inner Source) - Technical
Requirements
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Open Source Open Development / Inner Source
Sources public Sources open for everyone within Adobe
No meetings Meetings?
Public:
• Mailing list
• Slack
• Issue tracker
• Documentation
Anyone within Adobe can read/write
• Mailing list
• Slack
• Jira
• Wiki
Do everything within Adobe like it would work within an open source project

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> whoami
Open Development in Adobe for 6 years
 Granite
 https://wiki.corp.adobe.com/display/granite/Granite+Home
 New open dev projects in the works
Managing Adobe developers contributing to Apache Software Foundation projects
 Previously Apache Felix, Sling, Oak, Tika, Solr, etc
 Currently Apache OpenWhisk
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Attention: Opinion Piece Coming Up
YMMV
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Covering the Basics
 Code on Github and public
 Open/public
 Mailing list
 Slack
 Issue tracker
 Wiki
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Open Dev works best on
platform or library
software
 e.g. UI widgets,
database, framework,
message bus
 Stuff that other
developers can use to
build things
Your Software
Someone else’s Business
App
end user
Rough statistics (completely made-up)
100 users -> 10 contributors -> 1 committer

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Open Source / Open Development: Joe Doe’s Prototypical
Story
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1. Joe has put code on GitHub
Yay! Big celebration
2. Joe has talked about it
150 Tweets
3 blog posts
2 conference talks

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Expected Result
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Actual Result: No Magic Happened, No Unicorns Appeared
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Actual Result
(max) 10 Pull Requests
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Failed or forgot to build community of committers
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Why build community?
 Don’t start this before you have clarity
on this question
 It’s a long term commitment
 Answers differ
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 For example
 Platform software sustainable for a decade
 Industry impact / Adobe-internal impact
 …

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How to build community
Objective #1
You MUST enable and allow distributed decision
making
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How to build community
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Org
structure
Communicatio
n
structure
shapes shapes
Decision
structure
For example:
• BDFL
• Apache-style
Claim:
BDFL works for some open
source, but not for OpenDev

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How to build community
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Org
structure
Communicatio
n
structure
shapes shapes
Decision
structure
Hierarchical P2P
If this is distributed then:
No calls
No daily standups
No scrum?

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How to build community
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Org
structure
Communicatio
n
structure
shapes shapes
Decision
structure
Hierarchical Consensus

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The role of the EM in building community
Objective #1
Let go of your control on decisions
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All that sounds hard?
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The easy way to Open Development
 Go open source in a foundation like the ASF
 Foundation owns the IP, community owns the code
 Bonus: community rules for participation already written
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Ready to start?
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The fallacy of projecting fears
I am ready to go open,…
but <some other person in my
org>
is not

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Success Stories
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Success stories
 Open development:
Granite: ~150 committers throughout Adobe – 10 times more than reported in line to me
 Open source
Apache Sling
 AEM partners are ~50% of the community -> high partner stickyness and product participation
 Super successful and easy recruiting pipeline
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