Skip to content
Open
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from 24 commits
Commits
Show all changes
27 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
163c8ce
feat: promote discover-your-innersource
jeffabailey Feb 28, 2025
55182ef
chore: move file to initial dir
jeffabailey Feb 28, 2025
4be02b6
feat: add patlet
jeffabailey Mar 4, 2025
c77a420
Rename 'Also Known As' section to 'Alias' and move it to the end of t…
spier Mar 4, 2025
3360250
Reorder section, based on order in the template.
spier Mar 4, 2025
52333fc
Fix spelling of InnerSource
spier Mar 4, 2025
bae152f
Formatting fixes
spier Mar 4, 2025
dd3513c
Formatting of Solution section
spier Apr 2, 2025
70a01e3
Add link to Gig Marketplace pattern
spier Apr 2, 2025
99ebe10
Update patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md
jeffabailey Apr 11, 2025
35f2092
chore: refactor potentially relevant discussions
jeffabailey Apr 12, 2025
27a45ed
Merge branch 'promote-discover-your-innersource' of github.com:jeffab…
jeffabailey Apr 12, 2025
b3fe9d1
Move images to subfolder. Lowercase file extension.
spier Apr 13, 2025
211971e
Use lower case spelling for 'organization' and 'legal entity'
spier Apr 13, 2025
ba32a05
Reverting my last changes. Was on the wrong branch
spier Apr 13, 2025
17d6762
Update patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md
jeffabailey May 23, 2025
45ba35d
Remove acroyum 'SW'
spier May 23, 2025
fad79b6
Agora was renamed to SeazMe - adding a link
spier May 24, 2025
da655c2
Adding SeazMe link to another pattern as well
spier May 24, 2025
667ceca
Comment out link to Level-1 pattern
spier Sep 18, 2025
9b70a2d
Formatting change
spier Sep 18, 2025
c4b6292
Wording fix
spier Sep 18, 2025
42e8394
Fix spelling
spier Sep 18, 2025
f00bff2
Separate the two different aspects of the solution into their own sec…
spier Sep 18, 2025
4d8a55f
chore: simplify language, mention docs
jeffabailey Sep 19, 2025
94ab652
Merge branch 'promote-discover-your-innersource' of github.com:jeffab…
jeffabailey Sep 19, 2025
990bdb3
fix: vale error
jeffabailey Sep 19, 2025
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
86 changes: 0 additions & 86 deletions patterns/1-initial/discover-your-innersource.md

This file was deleted.

2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion patterns/1-initial/include-product-owners.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Product Owners are primarily product focus

## Known Instances

* PayPal is looking into finding a search solution for their project Agora. They are collaborating with other teams pursuing a similar mission, eliminating redundancy and inefficiency regarding effort and tools.
* PayPal is looking into finding a search solution for their project [SeazMe](https://github.com/paypal/seazme) (previously called Agora). They are collaborating with other teams pursuing a similar mission, eliminating redundancy and inefficiency regarding effort and tools.

## Status

Expand Down
95 changes: 95 additions & 0 deletions patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
## Title

Discover Your InnerSource

## Patlet

When developers don't look for or can't find internally developed solutions, they may waste time and resources creating redundant software. To solve this, implement a robust internal search engine and processes that encourage the discovery and reuse of internal code.

## Problem

People don't bother looking for internally developed solutions - they might not find the repo at all or be aware of its existence.

## Context

* Software component(s) are available internally but users can't easily find these.
* This problem is more likely to occur in large, federated companies where different organizational units operate as silos.
* Historically, the company does not have a culture of sharing code across silos.

## Forces

* No good internal search engine (or not connected to git repositories; and difficult to make this change happen)
* Users may not know there are common places to find internally developed solutions.
* People don't expect to find solutions internally.
* Many silos in the company; difficult to reach the developer base across those silos (a communications problem).
* People might not want to use internal software because they don't believe it will be helpful
- might not be maintained
- might have poor reusability
- if someone put out a software internally, the expectation is that they wouldn't have time to support it (vs. open source options)
* Difficulty in adding content to the search index makes it hard for people to find anything

## Solution

Make it easy to find the reusable code.

### Behavior and Process Changes

* Implement process change to motivate developers to first check for internal solutions for problems that they need to solve.
* Concierge service (guide) to help product people find stuff. Might not scale but could be helpful in the beginning.
* Need some very visible lighthouse projects that start using InnerSource components and make positive statements about the InnerSource program (to increase the trust of your developers in your InnerSource components.
* Encourage (and reward) owners of reusable code to use the same search engine to continually search for products that are candidates for use and adoption of the reusable code but not currently doing so.

### Tooling Changes

* Pull in repo names, descriptions and `README.md` files into the search engine assuming that a search engine exists. Note: a one-stop-shop kind of search engine for all relevant communication and documentation is difficult to attain. Even when using GitHub's enterprise offering, people often deploy additional systems like wikis to host content orthogonal to what is in the code repositories, slack channels (or IRC), mailing lists (or even nntp servers), some place to store stuff written down in office formats, search over personal e-mail etc. Several of these systems come with search built-in, but integrating this content in one search box or even just deploying a federated search engine across all sources often doesn't come off-the-shelf.

Check failure on line 44 in patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md

View workflow job for this annotation

GitHub Actions / vale

[vale] reported by reviewdog 🐶 [ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'nntp'? Raw Output: {"message": "[ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'nntp'?", "location": {"path": "patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md", "range": {"start": {"line": 44, "column": 444}}}, "severity": "ERROR"}
* Consider using existing tools:
* GitHub Enterprise and npmjs have built-in searches on meta-data
* PayPal's [SeazMe](https://github.com/paypal/seazme) project (previously called Agora) addresses similar challenges with data source integration

Check failure on line 47 in patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md

View workflow job for this annotation

GitHub Actions / vale

[vale] reported by reviewdog 🐶 [ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'Agora'? Raw Output: {"message": "[ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'Agora'?", "location": {"path": "patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md", "range": {"start": {"line": 47, "column": 84}}}, "severity": "ERROR"}
Copy link
Contributor Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Do we want to remove this since the project is archived?

If we don't, does it make sense to add Agora to Vale per the check failure?

* Tool with a central view (but people are more inclined to google externally than look internally)
* Establish a common, asynchronous communication platform (e.g., chat based) across team boundaries.
* This might not scale beyond a certain organization size.
* When using common chat systems, start with one single chat channel for the InnerSource project, only split into multiple channels by topic once traffic gets too high. This way the channel feels alive. In addition the number of input channels to watch is kept at a minimum for the host team.
* Note: having one channel for many users of one tool might be considered an anti-pattern because they can't find it unless they already know about it.
* Create a marketplace for marketing InnerSource programs (management can use this mechanism to know which InnerSource projects to fund, by seeing how the marketplace reacts). - see [Gig Marketplace](../2-structured/gig-marketplace.md)

## Resulting Context

* Internal components are easily visible
* Developers looking for code can search for it and find it quickly.
* Developers are now looking internally for software components
* Search results are combined (internal and external)
* Process changes, establishing a common communications channel, and encouraging and rewarding owners of reusable code to use the same search engine can contribute to changing the corporate culture. Transformation begins from the grassroots but requires strategic involvement of thought leaders.

<!--
// we don't want to link from Structured patterns to Initial patterns. hence removing this link.
// we can add this back in if the "Improved Findability" pattern is leveled up to maturity Structured
* See [Improved Findability](../1-initial/improve-findability.md) (aka Poor Naming Conventions or Badly Named Piles) as a related pattern.
-->

## Known Instances

* Nike Inc.
* WellSky

## Status

* Structured

## Authors

* Georg Gruetter

Check failure on line 80 in patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md

View workflow job for this annotation

GitHub Actions / vale

[vale] reported by reviewdog 🐶 [ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'Gruetter'? Raw Output: {"message": "[ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'Gruetter'?", "location": {"path": "patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md", "range": {"start": {"line": 80, "column": 9}}}, "severity": "ERROR"}
* Erin Bank
* Padma Sudarsan
* Tim Yao

## Acknowledgements

Check failure on line 85 in patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md

View workflow job for this annotation

GitHub Actions / vale

[vale] reported by reviewdog 🐶 [ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'Acknowledgements'? Raw Output: {"message": "[ISC.Spelling] Did you really mean 'Acknowledgements'?", "location": {"path": "patterns/2-structured/discover-your-innersource.md", "range": {"start": {"line": 85, "column": 4}}}, "severity": "ERROR"}

* Russ Rutledge
* Ofer Hermoni
* Robert Hanmer

## Alias

* Not looking for stuff internally
* Don't bother looking
* Find it Inside