In 2 recent blog posts, we discussed the benefits of Inner Source and its state in the industry in 2021. We recently identified a scientific paper published in late 2022 called What Motivates Software Practitioners to Contribute to Inner Source? by Zhiyuan Wan et al., published in the ESEC/FSE 2022 conference. The full paper is available here.
This post’s challenge is to provide a brief overview of the work done. We encourage you to read the paper to get more details on their work. Let’s try that.
The authors claim that existing research has addressed the challenges of Inner Source adoption, as well as tools, models, and frameworks to support it. The paper includes 74 bibliographic references about previous work on Inner Source. In this work, they investigate the developers’ motivations in contributing to Inner Source projects.
In particular, 3 research questions are addressed:
They combine data from:
Separated into 3 categories:
So the vast majority of motivations are internal.
Among the 14 motivators, items #4, #5, and #6 are the top 3 motivators.
Based on a recent study on motivations for contributing to Open Source projects, they’ve identified 3 main differences between Inner Source vs. Open Source, from the Inner Source perspective:
Not so surprisingly, they find correlations between motivation and contribution level. Job responsibility (#3) is the most positively correlated.
All 14 motivators are positively correlated with continuance intention. The belief in the effectiveness of inner source motivation (#4) shows the greatest correlation with continuance intention among the 14 motivators. The job responsibility (#3) has the weakest correlation.
90% of the survey respondents agree that they contribute to Inner Source projects because they’re convinced it benefits their company/organization (#4). Thus, the cultural shift for adopting inner source development may directly impact the success and sustainability of inner source projects.
Organizations should provide support, resources, and flexibility to practitioners in order to retain contributors and enable Inner Source communities to flourish.
They want to investigate other factors that impact practitioners’ contribution and continuance intention in Inner Source project. This will help to design strategies to sustain and grow inner source development.
You can find more content on Inner Source patterns and best practices on that link.
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