A case study of a corporate open source development model

Abstract

Open source practices and tools have proven to be highly effective for overcoming the many problems of geographically distributed software development. We know relatively little, however, about the range of settings in which they work. In particular, can corporations use the open source development model effectively for software projects inside the corporate domain? Or are these tools and practices incompatible with development environments, management practices, and market-driven schedule and feature decisions typical of a commercial software house? We present a case study of open source software development methodology adopted by a significant commercial software project in the telecommunications domain. We extract a number of lessons learned from the experience, and identify open research questions.

Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination

“…Offshore teams have other options as well, for example adopting a matrix form rather than mirroring the structure of the client team [52]. Under appropriate circumstances, such as when a number of different product groups want to enhance and maintain a common resource, an open source style of organizing development, in which various users of a resource develop the functionality they need, can be effective [31].…”

A comparative study of challenges in integrating Open Source Software and Inner Source Software

“…Different organizations have used different terms: at Philips Healthcare, it is called ''Inner Source'' or ''Inner Source Software'' [4], while at Alcatel-Lucent it is called ''Corporate Open Source'' [5]. At Hewlett-Packard Corp. this phenomenon is referred…”

“…Gurbani et al have reported on a project-based Inner Source model applied at Alcatel-Lucent [5,24], where the shared asset was a telecommunications signaling server used in a Software Product Line (SPL) [26]. Wesselius reports on a projectbased Inner Source model as applied at Philips Healthcare and discusses business model aspects [4].…”

“…While there is no ''standard'' set of practices with OSS development (OSSD), some common practices include universal, immediate access to all project artefacts (e.g., source code), release early and often [2], and making local changes to the software (which may lead to a separate ''fork''). 1 This phenomenon of adopting OSSD practices within a corporate setting is known as Inner Source [4], though other terms are in use as well, such as Corporate Open Source [5] and Progressive Open Source [6]. In this paper, we will use the term ''Inner Source''.…”

“…Mockus and Herbsleb also suggest that commercial software development can benefit from certain OSS practices [8], while other researchers have suggested that lessons can be learned from OSS communities [9,10]. Several success stories and lessons learned have been reported based on case studies in a number of large organizations that have adopted Inner Source, such as Alcatel-Lucent [5], HP 0950-5849/$ -see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2011.06.007 [6], Nokia [11], Philips [4] and SAP [12].…”