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dont-bother-looking.md

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Title

  • Don't bother looking
  • Not looking for stuff internally

Problem

People don't bother looking for internally developed solutions - they might not find the repo at all or be aware of its existence.

Context

  • Software component(s) are available internally but users can't easily find these.
  • This problem is more likely to occur where there are silos in the company (e.g., larger companies; smaller companies may have fewer opportunities for reuse of internally developed software).
  • The company traditionally has been bad at sharing across silos (people don't have the culture of sharing).

Forces

  • No good internal search engine (or not connected to git repositories; and difficult to make this change happen)
  • Users may not know there are common places to find internally developed solutions.
  • People don't expect to find solutions internally.
  • Many silos in the company; difficult to reach the developer base across those silos (a communications problem).
  • People might not want to use internal SW because they don't believe it will be helpful
    • might not be maintained
    • might have poor reusability
    • if someone put out a SW internally, the expectation is that they wouldn't have time to support it (vs. open source options)

Solution

  • Pull in Repo names, descriptions and README.md files into the search engine
  • Implement process change to first check for internal solutions for this problem
  • Tool with a central view (but people are more inclined to google externally than look internally)
  • Concierge service (guide) to help product people find stuff. Might not scale but could be helpful in the beginning.
  • Need some very visible lighthouse projects that start using inner source components and make positive statements about the inner source program.

Known instances

Desired Resulting Context

  • Internal components are easily visible
  • Developers looking for code can search for it and find it quickly.
  • Developers are now looking internally for software components
  • Search results are combined (internal and external)

Status

Brainstormed pattern idea in progress

Authors

  • Georg Grutter
  • Erin Bank
  • Padma Sudarsan
  • Tim Yao