open development - an engineering manager's perspective

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Open Development: An Engineering Manager’s PerspectiveMichael Marth | Director Engineering


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


> 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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https://wiki.corp.adobe.com/display/granite/Granite+Home


Attention: Opinion Piece Coming UpYMMV

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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 librarysoftware

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


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


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

…


How to build community

Objective #1

You MUST enable and allow distributed decision

making

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Org

structure

Communicatio

n

structure

shapes shapesDecision

structure

For example:

• BDFL

• Apache-style

Claim:

BDFL works for some open

source, but not for OpenDev



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Org

structure

Communicatio

n

structure


structure

Hierarchical P2P

If this is distributed then:

No calls

No daily standups

No scrum?



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Org

structure

Communicatio

n

structure


structure

Hierarchical Consensus


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


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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