The Big One(s)



InnerSource Adoption Obstacles from the Managements’ Perspective



InnerSource Adoption Obstacles from the Employees’ Perspective



Our Respondents found these Project Management Practices Problematic



Other Major Problems for InnerSource Adoption & Success

Common Themes: Misconception about InnerSource, Project Governance Structure, Legacy Tools/Contribution Evaluation System, Culture

Full Responses:

  • Ownership culture
  • No one dedicated to community building and facilitation - everyone is “on their own” by default, so it’s only the truly passionate that move things forward
  • Acculturation of the organization
  • Misconceptions about what innersource is (example: the source code is available, so it is innersource)
  • Not knowing who consumes a shared system or code can make it difficult to add features without risking breaking a consumer.
  • Change in management structure.
  • Middle-manager in-fighting
  • Product owner / product manager wider view, not just pressuring to deliver their project as a silo - work on the long term as well, collaborating with other projects/products
  • Misconception that just making the source code visible is innersource
  • Portfolio governance restricts developer contributing time
  • Innersource contributions are sometimes not counted as the sprint points for a developer.
  • Misconception about innersource
  • The existing tools that are mandated don’t allow for it.
  • Internal finance charging & timesheets. When we ran a hackathon to help business teams and improve customer outcomes, the first question was “are you providing a timesheet code for me to charge to?”. Second was… who is going to support these new features. It keeps coming up as “where is our 80/20 time?” And management are not willing to put cold hard cash behind innovation time.



Aspects Needing Immediate Attention for Ensuring InnerSource Success

Common Themes: Management Support, Community Building, Change in Mindset, Incentivize Contributions

Full Responses:

  • value proved by InnerSource projects
  • leadership buy-in, and embedding InnerSource into our goals
  • Approachability
  • Communication
  • Community Building
  • Management support
  • “Free” time for the people working to start the adoption process
  • momentum
  • Contribution model and incentivation or orgs that are focused to deliver SaaS apps. Using time for InnerSource is effort that does not pay off directly for the SaaS. Overall it will be beneficial, but locally its a big bun. And this makes starting InnerSource tricky.
  • people
  • More management support.
  • Middle manager fears and old-school time management
  • developer teams level of experience
  • common tooling and goals, mid-management mindset
  • Getting people to open up their code - they don’t feel it’s “good enough” to share
  • Ensure support from top management
  • Community
  • Ownership/control issues
  • extensive training
  • Communication
  • Management buy-in
  • leadership buy-in to change processes and practices
  • Attitude to adopt and promote InnerSource
  • Commitment
  • Establishing an open-by-default mindset
  • Make it the default
  • Middle management awareness
  • metrics and show the value being delivered.