This document discusses open development and inner sourcing practices at Adobe. It begins by outlining the technical requirements for open development projects within Adobe, which are similar to open source projects except that contributions are limited to within the company. The rest of the document discusses strategies for successfully building an open development community through distributed decision making and governance models. It also presents some Adobe open source project success stories like Granite and Sling to demonstrate the benefits of open practices.

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Open Development: An Engineering Manager’s Perspective
Michael Marth | Director Engineering

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Open Development (aka Inner Source) - Technical
Requirements
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Open Source Open Development / Inner Source
Sources public Sources open for everyone within Adobe
No meetings Meetings?
Public:
• Mailing list
• Slack
• Issue tracker
• Documentation
Anyone within Adobe can read/write
• Mailing list
• Slack
• Jira
• Wiki
Do everything within Adobe like it would work within an open source project

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> whoami
Open Development in Adobe for 6 years
 Granite
 https://wiki.corp.adobe.com/display/granite/Granite+Home
 New open dev projects in the works
Managing Adobe developers contributing to Apache Software Foundation projects
 Previously Apache Felix, Sling, Oak, Tika, Solr, etc
 Currently Apache OpenWhisk
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Attention: Opinion Piece Coming Up
YMMV
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Covering the Basics
 Code on Github and public
 Open/public
 Mailing list
 Slack
 Issue tracker
 Wiki
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Open Dev works best on
platform or library
software
 e.g. UI widgets,
database, framework,
message bus
 Stuff that other
developers can use to
build things
Your Software
Someone else’s Business
App
end user
Rough statistics (completely made-up)
100 users -> 10 contributors -> 1 committer

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Open Source / Open Development: Joe Doe’s Prototypical
Story
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1. Joe has put code on GitHub
Yay! Big celebration
2. Joe has talked about it
150 Tweets
3 blog posts
2 conference talks

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Expected Result
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Actual Result: No Magic Happened, No Unicorns Appeared
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Actual Result
(max) 10 Pull Requests
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Failed or forgot to build community of committers
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Why build community?
 Don’t start this before you have clarity
on this question
 It’s a long term commitment
 Answers differ
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 For example
 Platform software sustainable for a decade
 Industry impact / Adobe-internal impact
 …

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How to build community
Objective #1
You MUST enable and allow distributed decision
making
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How to build community
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Org
structure
Communicatio
n
structure
shapes shapes
Decision
structure
For example:
• BDFL
• Apache-style
Claim:
BDFL works for some open
source, but not for OpenDev

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How to build community
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Org
structure
Communicatio
n
structure
shapes shapes
Decision
structure
Hierarchical P2P
If this is distributed then:
No calls
No daily standups
No scrum?

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How to build community
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Org
structure
Communicatio
n
structure
shapes shapes
Decision
structure
Hierarchical Consensus

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The role of the EM in building community
Objective #1
Let go of your control on decisions
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All that sounds hard?
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The easy way to Open Development
 Go open source in a foundation like the ASF
 Foundation owns the IP, community owns the code
 Bonus: community rules for participation already written
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Ready to start?
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The fallacy of projecting fears
I am ready to go open,…
but <some other person in my
org>
is not

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Success Stories
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Success stories
 Open development:
Granite: ~150 committers throughout Adobe – 10 times more than reported in line to me
 Open source
Apache Sling
 AEM partners are ~50% of the community -> high partner stickyness and product participation
 Super successful and easy recruiting pipeline
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