Abstract
Despite growing interest of Open Innovation (OI) in Software Engineering (SE), little is known about what triggers software organizations to adopt it and how this affects SE practices. OI can be realized in numerous of ways, including Open Source Software (OSS) involvement. Outcomes from OI are not restricted to product innovation but also include process innovation, e.g. improved SE practices and methods. This study explores the involvement of a software organization (Sony Mobile) in OSS communities from an OI perspective and what SE practices (requirements engineering and testing) have been adapted in relation to OI. It also highlights the innovative outcomes resulting from OI. An exploratory embedded case study investigates how Sony Mobile use and contribute to Jenkins and Gerrit; the two central OSS tools in their continuous integration tool chain. Quantitative analysis was performed on change log data from source code repositories in order to identify the top contributors and triangulated with the results from five semi-structured interviews to explore the nature of the commits. The findings of the case study include five major themes: i) The process of opening up towards the tool communities correlates in time with a general adoption of OSS in the organization. ii) Assets not seen as competitive advantage nor a source of revenue are made open to OSS communities, and gradually, the organization turns more open. iii) The requirements engineering process towards the community is informal and based on engagement. iv) The need for systematic and automated testing is still in its infancy, but the needs are identified. v) The innovation outcomes included free features and maintenance, and were believed to increase speed and quality in development. Adopting OI was a result of a paradigm shift of moving from Windows to Linux. This shift enabled Sony Mobile to utilize the Jenkins and Gerrit communities to make their internal development process better for its software developers and testers.
Highlights
Software organizations have recently been exposed to new facets of openness that go beyond their experience and provide opportunities outside their organizational walls
We investigate these aspects through a case study at Sony Mobile and how it actively participate and contribute to the communities of the two Open Source Software (OSS) tools Jenkins and Gerrit
With 8.2% of the commits during the investigated time-span, they have established themselves in the community and been able to contribute the necessary adaptions for Gerrit to function as a part of the continuous integration tool-chain used inside Sony Mobile
Summary
Software organizations have recently been exposed to new facets of openness that go beyond their experience and provide opportunities outside their organizational walls. Chesbrough (Chesbrough 2003) explains the term Open Innovation (OI) as “a paradigm that assumes that organizations can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology”. OI is based on outside-in and inside-out knowledge flows that help to advance technology and spark innovation. Some classical examples of inside-out are selling intellectual property while outside-in correspond to start-up acquisition and integration. OI is fuelled by increased mobility of workers and knowledge, more capable universities, greater knowledge access and sharing capabilities that World Wide Web offers (Chesbrough et al 2014) and easier access to venture capital for start-ups
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