The Importance of Developer Experience and Innersource for Organizational Success
March 31, 2023 // 1 min read
At GitHub, we believe that developer experience is crucial to enabling people to do their best work. Developer Experience isn’t just about the tools, but is also about the people, process and community that you build. Think about Open Source communities. They work asynchronously, remotely, globally and openly. Modern engineering practices within your organization don’t need to be any different! Organizations are working in silos. Silos prevent collaboration, both internally across your teams and when they isolate you from the open source community. That’s where innersource comes in. Innersource is all about using open source practices within your internal software engineering organization.
Why Innersource? Why now?
We’re living in a world where companies need to digitally transform to continue innovating. Software engineering teams are at the heart of this, through the applications and services that they build.
As more and more companies embark on this transformation, the industry has a greater need for engineering talent. The result is a shortage in developers across the globe.
It is our responsibility as engineering leaders to create environments where our teams can thrive. By focusing on the developer experience, we can ensure that our developers can remain productive and happy in the work that they do. The byproduct of this, is that our organizations are recognized as great places to work, and attract and retain the best talent.
When we talk about developer experience, tooling is a big part of the problem. Companies are focused on consolidating, and doing more with less. But tooling isn’t the only problem. Creating an environment where people and processes are streamlined, and empowering for our developer communities is just as important.
This is where innersource can help. Rather than engineering teams being separated across organizational boundaries, they are encouraged to collaborate with each other across the company, and adopt the same principles as open source communities.
This even helps mitigate problems such as Conway’s law, the idea that organizations design systems based on their organizational structure. The more that we can eliminate those barriers, reduces the friction in cross-team collaboration, and encourages a greater amount of collective innovation that will take place across the company.
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