You have the concept of Open Source where anyone can see the Source Code and can edit it. With private repositories, only a certain group can see and contribute. One team in our company says their private repository is Inner Source, which means developers from other teams can contribute.
My team uses this team’s library and one of the members of my team was annoyed by one of their bugs, so decided she would fix it. She correctly assigns the Bug to herself, implements the fix, and sends a Pull Request to the other team.
After 4 days, there’s a Slack message posted in our channel asking her what the status is with the Bug. Their manager says that the Bug was planned to be fixed this month, and because it had been taken:
“This can cause duplication of effort and put our planned deliverable at risk”
How can it cause duplication? She assigned it to herself, and if other developers were dumb enough to work on it, then that’s their fault. They didn’t actually do any work on it though. What actually happened was they discussed the Bug in their “refinement session” and realised it had already been taken.
How can it put their deliverables at risk? If they planned 10 items and we took 1, that’s only 9 for them to deliver. They are now closer to completion.
I don’t understand why they keep boasting about being Inner Source, then they keep making things awkward for people when they contribute.
- They seem to have an overly pedantic system of rules which keep being more complex as time goes on.
- They aren’t prompt with feedback, and aren’t that friendly when they do respond.
- They love experimenting with all kinds of tools, and they only make sure they are compatible with Linux, yet most other developers use Windows so sometimes struggle to contribute to their repository.
Also, the Pull Request has been open for 4 days. We want it checked in; you are putting our deliverables at risk.
Stranger Coding Tings 