Abstract
Modern business leaders know it is important to be able to work fast, adapt to change, and build on existing solutions. This is especially true of digital business, where the high rate of change creates a continuous stream of new problems and new opportunities. Many have called for business leaders to adopt more ‘agile’ structures and processes that embrace change, transparency, and employee empowerment. Now a new complementary approach called ‘inner source’ is emerging to help address this. Inner source does not only embrace speed and change; it also lays out techniques for globally distributed agile teams to systematically store and reuse solutions in a shared, organization-wide repository. This paper explores this new management concept – where it came from, what it means – and illustrates its value in large organizations. Building on a number of illustrative cases, we explain how certain business leaders have brought the principles and practices of inner source to their respective organizations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Beck, K.: Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass (2000)
Schwaber, K., Beedle, M.: Agile Software Development with SCRUM. Prentice Hall (2002)
Conboy, K., Morgan, L.: Beyond the customer: opening the agile systems development process. Inf. Softw. Technol. 53, 535–542 (2011)
Morgan, L., Gleasure, R., Baiyere, A.: Share and share alike: how inner source can help create new digital platforms. Calif. Manage. Rev. 64(1), 90–112 (2021)
Stol, K.-J., Avgeriou, P., Babar, M.A., Lucas, Y., Fitzgerald, B.: Key factors for adopting inner source. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 23(2), 2 (2014)
Morgan, L., Feller, J., Finnegan, P.: Exploring inner source as a form of intraorganisational open innovation. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (2011)
Campraro, M., Riehle, D.: Inner source definition, benefits, and challenges. ACM Comput. Surv. 49(4), 1–36 (2017)
Riehle, D.: Agile Feature Teams vs. Inner Source (2018). Available at: https://dirkriehle.com/2018/09/25/agile-feature-teams-vs-inner-source/
Cooper, D., Stol, K.-J.: The InnerSource Approach to Innovation and Software Development. O’Reilly Media Inc. (2018)
Carroll, N., Morgan, L., Conboy, K.: Examining the impact of adopting inner source software practices. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, Paris (2018)
Acknowledgement
This work was supported with the financial support of the Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094_2.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Morgan, L., Gleasure, R., Baiyere, A. (2022). Is Inner Source the Next Stage in the Agile Revolution?. In: Elbanna, A., McLoughlin, S., Dwivedi, Y.K., Donnellan, B., Wastell, D. (eds) Co-creating for Context in the Transfer and Diffusion of IT. TDIT 2022. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 660. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17968-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17968-6_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-17967-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-17968-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)
