The Business Impact of Inner Source and How to Quantify It

Abstract: Inner source software development is the practice of using open source practices for firm-internal software development. Practitioner reports have shown that inner source can increase flexibility and reduce costs. Despite the potential benefits of inner source, there has been little research on its impact on businesses and their processes. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review that identified which business processes are affected by inner source development, particularly within the accounting and management domain. Our review revealed the need for new dedicated community building processes within companies. In addition, we examined computational tools and techniques that can be used to measure inner source development. We found that existing tools and techniques are insufficiently suitable to manage inner source processes. Based on this, we propose research topics for future work on quantifying inner source.

Keywords: inner source, open source, internal open source, software engineering, software development, business processes, cost estimation, effort estimation, cost calculation, accounting, taxation, transfer pricing

Reference: Stefan Buchner and Dirk Riehle. 2023. The Business Impact of Inner Source and How to Quantify It. ACM Comput. Surv. Accepted in July 2023.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3611648

A preprint of the paper is available as a PDF.