The visual above, is a close approximation of our strategy which involves both the typical innovation cycle and the traditional action learning cycle which is analogous to the way we do retrospectives and sprint planning.
With open source, as the mantra goes, you get what you’ve created, you get what others have created – you get what everyone has created.
Being upstream means we contribute our changes to the code, our improvements to the code, and we take all of the improvements made by others, as we do our work.
We’ve made a conscious decision to be upstream on the open source code repositories because this is how we make sure that our team is always leading. This isn’t always easy, and we will have challenges. But, if you are serious about an open source model being core to your value proposition – you cannot compromise on this. What happens, what I have seen happen, is that companies say to themselves that they’ll one day get back to the open source model, that as soon as the demands of the quarter financials or the most recent release are done, or their most important customer has gotten to production, then that is when they’ll start the process of contributing to a project. I have yet to see this work.
What does work is to make the strategic decision to use an open source model. With open source, as the mantra goes, you get what you’ve created, you get what others have created – you get what everyone has created. This plays havoc with those who want a deterministic waterfall development practice with all known-knowns. But, that’s always been an illusion, so it’s ok to stop pursuing that.
The implication of this is that one must pay a lot of attention to all of the pull requests coming in, from everyone, and not just your team. You need to have good test coverage. As we build out our internal quality CI/CD systems, this is what we are paying attention to: maintainable, readable code, tickets for all PR’s, and commits reviewed properly. You can follow our changes on the fineract and Mifos github repos.
We’ve made a conscious decision to be upstream on the open source code repositories because this is how we make sure that our team is always leading. This isn’t always easy, and we will have challenges. But, if you are serious about an open source model being core to your value proposition – you cannot compromise on this. What happens, what I have seen happen, is that companies say to themselves that they’ll one day get back to the open source model, that as soon as the demands of the quarter financials or the most recent release are done, or their most important customer has gotten to production, then that is when they’ll start the process of contributing to a project. I have yet to see this work.
