Open Source Summit North America 2023

Peter Drucker famously postulated that “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it”, which is true for InnerSource efforts. We are flying in the dark without metrics and may struggle to secure support from top-level management or funding for ongoing InnerSource efforts. This talk is about metrics for our InnerSource Programs. For example, we need to answer: At the activity level - who is working where and doing what and are we fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing? In the context of code reviews - are we creating more reliable artifacts and establishing a homogenous way of working across the organization? For software delivery - are we increasing the stability of the software production cycle and can take actions based on data as soon as issues are detected. We present metrics for each of these goals discuss how each metric can be interpreted and used for managing InnerSource. Examples of InnerSource metrics were collected with the industry standard open source GrimoireLab tool. In conclusion, this talk shares good practices we collected in the InnerSource Commons with the goal of giving new community members a primer on our growing knowledge base and giving long-time members an opportunity to reflect on their own use of metrics and how they may want to evolve it.