It’s funny (or depressing), because the original concept of agile is very well aligned with an open source/inner source philosophy.

The whole premise of a sprint is supposed to be that you move quickly and with purpose for a short period of time, and then you stop and refactor and work on your tools or whatever other “non value-add” stuff tends to be neglected by conventional deliverable-focused processes.

The term “sprint” is supposed to make it clear that it’s not a sustainable 100%-of-the-time every-single-day pace. It’s one mode of many.

Buuuut that’s not how it turned out, is it?

@CapriciousDay yup, that's something that needs to be addressed and it is a more fundamental issue. If employees are not given enough empowerment, than cross-team collaboration and innovation suffers for sure. Nevertheless I think it is possible to have this together with scrum and other agile methodologies, as long as some capacity is reserved for this type of activity that requires empowerment.

And contributions to codebases that have developed with the goal of meeting the team's own needs, and who similarly don't have the time or space to refactor or review as needed to enable effective contributions.

Enabling Innersource will be a priority for management for only two weeks, anyway, before they focus on something else. And if it even makes it into measurable goals, it will probably be gamed so it doesn't ruin bonuses.

Do you also work for $GenericMultinationalCompany, per-chance? Do you also know $BillFromFinance?