Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

11-2022

Abstract

Software development organizations have adopted open source development practices to support or augment their software development processes, a phenomenon referred to as inner source. Given the rapid adoption of inner source, we wonder what motivates software practitioners to contribute to inner source projects. We followed a mixed-methods approach--a qualitative phase of interviews with 20 interviewees, followed by a quantitative phase of an exploratory survey with 124 respondents from 13 countries across four continents. Our study uncovers practitioners' motivation to contribute to inner source projects, as well as how the motivation differs from what motivates practitioners to participate in open source projects. We also investigate how software practitioners' motivation impacts their contribution level and continuance intention in inner source projects. Based on our findings, we outline directions for future research and provide recommendations for organizations and software practitioners.

Keywords

Inner source, Motivation, Software development, Open collaboration, Internal open source

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Singapore, Singapore, 2022 November 14-18

First Page

132

Last Page

144

Identifier

10.1145/3540250.3549148

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3540250.3549148

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