Living in a BIOSphere at Robert Bosch

This case study was taken from the chapter of the same name in ‘Adopting Inner Source’ (July 2018) The chapter was authored by Georg Grütter, Diogo Frogonese and Jason Zink.

Introduction

Robert Bosch GmbH was founded in 1886 in Germany. It produces a range of products and services from mobility and industrial solutions to energy and building technology and consumer goods. By 2018, the company was generating revenues of approximately €78.1 billion and employed 402,000 people worldwide. 

The Bosch Internal Open Source (BIOS) experiment commenced in 2009. The experiment was expanded into an initiative that ran until 2015. The program then evolved into a second phase, the Social Coding initiative. 

At the time of publication, BIOS and the Social Coding initiative had demonstrated the benefits of InnerSource for geographic collaboration, innovation and high quality software and products. 

InnerSource Objectives

By 2009, a critical need had been identified within Bosch – to improve the efficiency of software development across its distributed global network.

The success of Open Source communities in collaborating across geographic and time differences was of particular interest to senior management.

The BIOS initiative was devised to use Open Source principles and practices to address a range of issues within Bosch. The program had three key objectives:

• To increase the efficiency of distributed software development by fostering collaboration across different business units and to increase knowledge sharing.
• To provide an internal training ground for staff (known as ‘associates’) to participate in Open Source communities.
• To attract talented software developers to the company.

The InnerSource Journey

Start as an Experiment

BIOS was originally positioned as a small-scale, three year experiment.

Framing the initiative as a time-limited experiment made the program attractive to executive management. Companies have lower expectations of ‘experiments’. The time-limited nature of the initiative enabled decision-makers to approve the initiative without the pressure of committing resources over the long-term.

Centralised stewardship and funding

From 2009-2012, BIOS was overseen by the Corporate Research Department. When the research stage ended, the remit for BIOS moved to the Corporate Engineering. 

During this six year period, BIOS received corporate (rather than business unit) funding of
€1.5 million per year. 

As a program focused on culture change, collaboration and improved efficiencies spanning units and regions, BIOS had a natural fit within these centralized departments. As a centralized unit, it also avoided political or budget related conflicts that could have potentially derailed cross-team collaboration.

Culture before tooling – the Bosch BIOSphere

A primary objective of the project was to upskill developers to participate in Open Source communities. With this in mind, the first priority of the BIOS initiative was the creation of a parallel working environment that mirrored Open Source culture. 

The ‘BIOSphere’ was created as a safe space to explore Open Source development models within Bosch. The BIOSphere operated on the basis of five core values underpinning successful Open Source communities:

• Openness – ease of access and participation for contributors
• Transparency – the sharing of work products, communication and decision-making with all Bosch associates
• Voluntariness – the choice to participate was left to associates themselves (not their managers)
• Self-determination – associates were free to choose what they wanted to work on
• Meritocracy – power was vested in BIOS project members based on the quality and quantity of contributions made

Any Bosch associate could propose a new ‘community’ for the BIOSphere. Proposals were evaluated according to the following criteria:

• The community’s goals had to align with the overall mission of the BIOS initiative. This ensured that the community would support the BIOS mission and also align with the broader company strategy. 
• The community had to appoint a full-time community leader. 
• The community needed to adhere to the five BIOS values.
• The community had to be geographically distributed and cross-departmental. 

The BIOS Review Committee 

Up to the end of 2015, the approval of new BIOS communities was signed off by a formal committee. Committee members were vice presidents of engineering business units. 

The Review Committee met twice a year to evaluate proposals and to review progress of communities. The committee also had the authority to ‘retire’ a community, when necessary.

The committee gave managers an opportunity to ‘constructively influence’ the initiative without stepping into a more direct management (or micromanagement) space. 

The official participation of management in the program also ensured that communities had ‘executive air cover’. 

BIOS Governance Office

The BIOS Governance Office (BGO) was established to co-ordinate the program. The BGO consisted of one staff member. The BGO had responsibility for assisting the development of community proposals, community support, development of a legal framework for BIOS, contracting, the BIOS license, budget management, purchasing and all related organizational tasks.

In taking over the administrative burden associated with projects, the BGO freed up precious time for communities to focus entirely on development. 

Attracting Community Leaders and Contributors

Staff ‘buyouts’

BIOS recognised that the vast majority of developers were ‘time poor’. To address the challenge of getting developers to join BIOS communities, the BGO used the vast majority of funding to ‘buy out’ staff for community leader or development roles. 

Community leader roles were 100% funded while business units could be reimbursed for up to 50% of a developer’s time.

Staff contracts

The buyout or reimbursement of staff time was supported by a formal contract. This provided formal recognition of the new working arrangement for managers and associates. It also facilitated a smooth process for sign-off.

Community Leaders

Community Leaders were instrumental to the success of the program. As full-time staff, they were enabled to establish, promote and grow their communities. Their role was crucial in terms of attracting, supporting contributors and ensuring high levels of productivity.

Contributors

The values-based BIOS culture of voluntariness and self-determination was a key attraction for many associates who wanted to solve problems or refine processes that they were affected by. Consequently, the BIOSphere attracted many highly motivated, enthusiastic contributors.

The BIOS License

The BGO devised a BIOS License for all its communities. The license was based on existing Open Source licenses and its purpose was to protect developers from any liability claims. 

The license verified that BIOS software was available for use by the whole company. However, business units were ultimately responsible for protecting intellectual property, ensuring compliance and accepting liability on warranty claims for their products. 

Challenges

Adapting to changes in funding

In 2015, senior management decided that BIOS had reached maturity and no longer required support from the BIOS Review Committee and the BGO. With the closure of the BGO, all funding for the BIOS program ended.

The launch of the Social Coding Initiative

In response to this, some former BIOS community members and the governance officer started a grassroots initiative. After lobbying executive managers, the Social Coding initiative was established as ‘Phase 2’ of the program. 

The Social Coding initiative received funding from 2015 to 2018. However, this was a smaller budget and no longer funded staff time on projects. 

The initiative’s mission was to continue driving cultural change towards ‘… the BIOS way of working’. In this iteration of the program, the primary focus was on infrastructure that enabled collaboration across the company; and supporting staff to use a shared platform. 

During this phase, the Social Coding initiative provided Stash and then Bitbucket free of charge to all interested business units. The platforms could be used for open or closed projects with the intention being that staff would have increased exposure to ‘gold standard’ BIOS communities on the shared platform and learn more about InnerSource.

The search for internal funding

In 2018, corporate funding of the Social Coding initiative ended. A crowd funding campaign raised the resources needed for the social coding team. However, the time and administrative burden of fundraising was prohibitive. 

In 2019, it was decided to set up a decentralized community of Social Coding advocates. Business units were offered a stake in the initiative and in the accompanying infrastructure. However, at the time of publication, the concept had not been fully tested. 

The impact of losing Community Leaders

When funding ended for Community Leader roles, there was a significant decrease in the number of contributions and overall productivity of their respective communities.

Making InnerSource sustainable

Cross-team collaboration, shared code and employee retention benefits all business units. However, it is challenging to put a monetary value on improved processes, shared code or software that is far removed from the end product. Offering developer time to external projects or contributing a portion of the team budget to an InnerSource office may not fit with perceived business priorities or budgets.

A key takeaway for the BIOS and Social Coding teams was the importance of spending time in the early stages to build up and empower a community that can continue to drive initiatives if and when funding ceases to exist. 

Rewarding Contributors

BIOS successfully attracted a range of highly motivated contributors over its lifetime. Many community members were able to leverage their increased visibility to benefit their career.

However, contributors would have benefited from a more formal promotion pathway that was facilitated by HR.

In Open Source and InnerSource communities, ‘credit is currency’. As internal business units were not familiar with crediting BIOS contributions or assets, this led to:

‘… feelings of betrayal among BIOS developers because their work was taken without any recognition.’

Brand dilution

As success stories became more widespread, some units made claims that they were also BIOS projects. However, this led to brand dilution with units claiming to be part of the BIOS brand without undertaking the work or applying the core values.

Regulations and transfer pricing

As a global organization, export controls and taxation across different countries must be taken into account. As a result, the BIOS team had to work closely with the legal department to develop the BIOS license and to consider the implications of ‘exporting’ code for federal tax authorities and transfer pricing.  

Results

A number of positive outcomes were recorded over the lifetime of the BIOS and Social Coding initiatives:

• 300 developers from 15 business units across three continents participated in 11 BIOS communities. Approximately 8,000 staff used the shared platform through the Social Coding initiative. At the time of publication, the Social Coding team had facilitated collaboration amongst 150 business units in 28 countries and the total number of projects and communities had reached 600. 

• There was a marked increase in innovation in both existing business units and new areas. Three high profile examples include the:

• Teleheater app
• COM4T IP-Stack
• Visualization for tram collision avoidance

• BIOS communities achieved very high rates of productivity and also earned a reputation for producing high quality software.

• Across BIOS communities, there were reported increased levels of both ‘happiness and work satisfaction’.

Conclusion

From a Bosch perspective, the BIOS and Social Coding initiatives were very successful in generating high levels of InnerSource adoption and collaboration. The use of InnerSource methodologies led to increased innovation and productivity. It also enabled collaboration between diverse business units working in different geographic regions. Higher levels of work satisfaction amongst participating associated were also reported.

Sourcing long-term funding for InnerSource projects remains a challenge. However, even in the absence of funding, many teams with Bosch have started basing aspects of their development processes on the BIOS model.