Pattern idea: Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Problem

• Teams with resource constraints may be reluctant to adopt InnerSource (accept contributions), due to fear of missing resources to review and integrate them in reasonable time
• Contributors get frustrated to to lack of response or excessive delay on review and merge of contributions

Solution

The maintainers of the receiving component will document their Service Level Agreement (SLA) with respect to reviewing and merging / rejecting contributions and answering to bug reports, feature requests.

The SLA may also state no-warranty clauses (i.e. projects maintained in spare time).

Contributors will know up front what to expect before contributing, and can better decided whether to invest their time contributing, avoiding waste of resources and frustration.

Related patterns

• 30 day warranty
• Start as an experiment

References

• Martin Woodward (GitHub) at ISC.S11 - The 5 Myths of InnerSource - 8:48 - the slide states SLA for PR and issue triage

No file, test, or entry point is named; start by reviewing issue 231, the related patterns, and the linked InnerSource reference. Done means documenting a Service Level Agreement pattern covering contribution review, merge or rejection, bug reports, feature requests, and any no-warranty clauses.