Inner Source - to Excel on Developer Initiatives

Abstract

This thesis improves and studies the Inner Source Development environment in Ericsson. Inner Source Development focuses on cooperation among developer, manager and customer, and collaboration among developers. This thesis starts with 7 semistructured interviews with developers and managers from different teams in Ericsson. The aim of semi-structured interviews is to know the requirements of stakeholders and their opinions on existing tools used in Ericsson and on the market. The thesis presents a comparison among 5 different tools: Eforge, OpenALM, Gerrit, Gitlab and Github Enterprise from 4 aspects: searching, sharing, collaboration and other quality issues. With the interview result and the comparison, the original plan to improve the Inner Source Development environment was to import Github Enterprise or Gitlab EE. However, with some obstructions of funds and pilot plan, this plan was rejected and turned into improving the existing tool: Gerrit. Gerrit is improved on 2 aspects: searching function and complete information of project. Three new function were developed and deliveried to Gerrit Open Source community. The largest challenges in this thesis are understanding of large amounts of code, different ways controlling of modified system, communication problems because of jet lag and lack of time to test. The study provides a table of comparison among 5 tools.