What Is Innersource
Open source practices for your internal software engineering organization.
Bring open source practices to organizations internally
These days, open source work asynchronously, remotely, globally, and openly—and modern engineering practices within your organization don’t have to be any different.
Streamline your development workflow
Companies are focused on consolidating, and doing more with less. That includes creating an environment where processes are streamlined and teams feel empowered.
Create a better developer experience.
By enabling a collaborative community, innersource creates a better developer experience, where devs can harness their collective knowledge, innovate, and do their best work.
InnerSource Commons logo
Why innersource?
Increase visibility
All internal software projects are visible to all employees—by default.
Bugs and feature requests can be raised by any employee.
Every proposed change is automatically tested and the result is shown in the pull request.
Fork and branch when you want
Anyone can make a copy of a project and make changes freely.
Automate manual tasks
Save time with issue triage, cutting releases, version bumping, and writing release notes.
Accelerate pull requests
People outside a project team can suggest changes and contribute to the project.
How top companies are using innersource today
3M //
Ford //
Otto Group //
Societe Generale //
How to get started
Like any cultural transformation, adopting innersource practices is a journey. To succeed, start as an experiment, define your success criteria, review, iterate, and improve.
Automate acceptance criteria. This includes passing builds, successful unit tests, code coverage, and security scans.
Innersource isn’t just about receiving more contributions to your project. By making your code available, another team could reuse your work— rather than having to reinvent the wheel.
Set the default repository visibility to internal at the enterprise level, so that employees across the organization can access new repositories by default.
Reward collaboration
Celebrate and recognize achievements. This could be praise, added bonus points in a review cycle, or form part of expected responsibilities for more senior members of the engineering team.
Given the cultural change needed when embarking on an innersource journey, patience is needed. This is not a quick process. The InnerSource Commons demonstrate the maturity model pattern to help you recognize where you are on your journey.
Encourage cooperation
Ready to contribute to a project, but have no idea where to start? The InnerSource Commons discuss the innersource portal pattern, as well as the repository activity score pattern.
Learn, share, and grow with other innersource communities
Securing and delivering high-quality code with innersource metrics
With innersource, it’s important to measure both the amount of innersource activity and the quality of the code being created.
How to measure innersource across your organization
The innersource contribution percentage is the rate of contributions from people outside the team that originally authored the software.
Solving the innersource discovery problem
Imagine you’re in an organization with more than 2,000 repositories across several different product lines. It can be daunting to find the right project.
Head over to the InnerSource Commons community page for ways that you can get involved. This includes saying hello over slack, joining a working group to produce new learning resources on innersource, and more.