Communities for CodeWhat can engineering leaders learn from Open Source communities?

@brettporter

Teams that work well together

Well engineered, more approachable code

A sense of satisfaction and growth for engineers

Hats

Open Source Flavours

• Governance

• License

• Independence

• Size

The ASF

• Govern of merit

• Peer to Peer

• Consensus decision making

• Open, online communication

• Responsible oversight

Community Matters

Community Success Stories

Traits of Successful Communities

• Onboarding

• Ownership

• Openness

• Opportunity

Onboarding

• Successful communities make it easy for new people to get involved

• Documentation for onboarding

• Mentoring

• Attentiveness to contributions

• Low barrier to entry

Use Onboarding

• For new starters, and those changing responsibilities

• Provide the resources to get started

• Use common practices and tooling

• Provide access to those who can help

• Remove barriers

It’s easy to start with small changes that

make your life easier

It’s easy to start with small changes that

make your life easier

Over time, become invested in the project’s

success and feel a sense of ownership for

your work

A Shared MissionWorking on something that is important to you, with other people who share that view

Encourage Ownership

• Responsibility for code from inception to production

• Have a mission, a shared goal for a team to work towards

• Self-motivated individuals, empowered to achieve and shape their goal

Openness

• Open communication

• Open decision making

• Allows inspection and participation by “outsiders”

• Improve quality by diverse experience and many eyes

Favour Openness

• Have a level of autonomy for an engineering team

• Have open peer review

• Spread knowledge and avoid the “bus factor”

• Use tools that facilitate openness

• Example: http://paypal.github.io/InnerSourceCommons/

Open Source provides opportunities to work on something important to

you and to grow as an engineer

Opportunity

• Contributions that are respected, recognised and reviewed

• Learning to seek consensus

• Work with some of the best engineers in the industry as mentors

Provide Opportunity

• Offer the same opportunities for engineers in their work

• Give opportunities to talk about their work internally and externally

• Grow engineers, but also attract and retain top talent

Open Source

• Encourage engineers to engage in Open Source to connect with those communities

• Consider Open Source, developed openly for your own code where appropriate

Communities for Code

• Onboarding

• Ownership

• Openness

• Opportunity

• Learn from Open Source communities

• Engage in Open Source communities

Drop me a line

@brettporter

brett.porter@safetyculture.io

brett@apache.org