Assessing your team’s readiness for external contributions: A Guide for InnerSource Teams

InnerSource is a collaborative and cost-effective approach to software development that encourages software reuse and co-creation. Many organizations have embraced InnerSource (IS) to reap these benefits by opening their projects for reuse within the organization and enabling contributions from various teams. However, it is crucial to establish a certain level of maturity in IS projects before inviting contributions. This paper introduces IS self-assessment guidelines designed to help IS teams at IKEA (Ingka Group) evaluate the maturity level of their IS projects. We developed the IS self-assessment guidelines following the design science methodology. The focus of the guidelines is to assess how ready IS teams are to receive external contributions.