Collection of InnerSource User Stories

[dellagustin-sap]

Description

In software development, user stories are used to express usage scenarios that lead to requirements or feature requests. They are an instrument deeply connected to user experience and design.

This issue represents an idea to express such usage scenarios from the perspective of an interested party of a project/project deliverable, focusing on empowering the interested party to find their way, participate and contribute. We will call these InnerSource User Stories.

The expected benefit of this exercise is to facilitate the adoption of InnerSource practices, by presenting potential adopters with pre-defined stories they can use as base for their project, and also present them with known ways to fulfill the user story. The typical way to describe how to fulfill one or more user stories should be an InnerSource Pattern.

These user stories should also help in defining the concept of Contributor Journey Optimization ( #157 )

Examples:

ID	User Story	Known Solution(s)
US-RS-FEEDBACK-1	As an interested party, I want to provide feedback in a transparent and traceable manner, in order to continuously improve the project and have a better experience with it.
US-RS-FEEDBACK-2	As an interested party, I want to know where to find existing feedback given to the project, in order avoid providing repeated feedback, learn from it, and enrich it with my own experience or opinions.

Related Challenges

• Contributor Journey Optimization #157

[akritiko]

Hey @dellagustin-sap. What you suggest here may be the key to sth bigger. So I followed up on your idea and I thought what if to try to map practical uses of the inner source patterns in the form of user stories.

I tried a toy example with ChatGPT. I gave it as a seed the description of the "Start as an experiment" pattern and got 5 hypothetical needs of this pattern to fictional SaaS companies:

1. EduFlex (Online Education SaaS)

User Story:
As an engineer at EduFlex, I want to contribute to a shared grading service during a six-month InnerSource pilot so that different teams can reuse it and reduce duplicate work.

Acceptance Criteria:

Contributions accepted from multiple teams.

At least 5 merged PRs from teams outside the original owner.

Demonstrated reduction in duplicated code across projects.

2. FinSight (Financial Analytics SaaS)

User Story:
As a product team member, I want to participate in a three-month InnerSource pilot for a shared data ingestion module so that we can collaborate across silos and improve data quality.

Acceptance Criteria:

Pilot runs for a fixed 3-month window.

Contributions come from at least two distinct product teams.

Metrics collected on PR volume and ingestion error reduction.

3. HealthTrack (Healthcare SaaS)

User Story:
As a developer at HealthTrack, I want to experiment with InnerSource on the compliance validation library for four months so that teams can share improvements while ensuring regulatory integrity.

Acceptance Criteria:

Open repository accessible to all teams.

Contributions improve test coverage by at least 20%.

Compliance checks validated by QA across multiple teams.

4. RetailBoost (E-Commerce Optimization SaaS)

User Story:
As a pricing engine engineer, I want to collaborate on a shared InnerSource pricing module over two quarters so that product teams can avoid rebuilding similar functionality.

Acceptance Criteria:

Cross-team contributions merged every sprint.

Pricing engine reused in at least two distinct products.

Regular reviews demonstrate reduced time spent on duplicate implementations.

5. MarTechPro (Marketing Automation SaaS)

User Story:
As a campaign template developer, I want to join a 90-day InnerSource pilot for the email templating engine so that we can accelerate delivery of new campaign features.

Acceptance Criteria:

At least 3 external teams contribute enhancements.

Feature delivery time reduced compared to previous quarter.

Feedback collected and presented to management at pilot close.

Now what if we could start a catalogue of use cases of the patterns in the form of user stories from our community?

Might be very far of what you are thinking, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I read your ticket :)

[dellagustin-sap]

cc @spier , this is something you may want to follow.

[spier]

I don't fully get the idea here.
Do you mean marking open issues with the "good first issues" label, so that new user know where they can start contributing? (I actually think that you mean something else though :))

Also the idea from @akritiko is proposing something entirely different, or am I misunderstanding things here?

[jeffabailey]

This issue is stale because it has been open 30 days with no activity. It will be closed in 5 days if no further activity occurs.

[dellagustin-sap]

I'm still planning to work on this one.