Mr. Gerkins: InnerSource's first open tool
InnerSource brings open development to all collaboration. Bijil Abraham Philip explains what happened when his team hopped on the InnerSource bandwagon. They immediately ran into tooling issues, so they created InnerSource's first open source tool, Mr. Gerkins, to automate the many mundane tasks associated with repository management in a collaborative organization.
| Talk Title | Mr. Gerkins: InnerSource's first open tool |
| Speakers | Bijil Abraham Philip (Amazon) |
| Conference | O’Reilly Open Source Convention |
| Conf Tag | Making Open Work |
| Location | Austin, Texas |
| Date | May 8-11, 2017 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
InnerSource at PayPal allows contributors from outside of a team to actively contribute to its codebase. However, the added perks of getting more work done brings additional overhead. PayPal now needs to track additional information about external pull requests, keep the external contributors informed about the status of their pull requests and the go-live date of their feature, and notify stake holders about the status of its releases. Bijil Abraham Philip explains what happened when his team hopped on the InnerSource bandwagon. They immediately ran into tooling issues, so they created InnerSource’s first open source tool, Mr. Gerkins, to automate the many mundane tasks associated with repository management in a collaborative organization, such as generating release notes, notifying pull request owners about tag creation, notifying distribution lists about releases, and identifying and labeling pull requests as InnerSource, so that developers and trusted committers can focus on the things that matter.
