About Open Pool

In-house software development is key to many business, both when software is part of a product, such as industrial equipment or medical devices, or implements a business process, such as common in financial services or retail.  With that, companies operate collections of tools to support their development teams, from tracking and version control to collaboration and build systems. These tool landscapes typically comprise a variety of tools from different vendors and need to be improved and modernised over time to meet changing business requirements.

Open Pool is focussed on solutions to improve and evolve members’ software engineering capabilities, helping them improve their processes and the tools supporting those processes. The community contains both technical projects to improve the tool landscape and packaged services and best practices around DevOps, DevSecOps, and software suppy chain management.

Open Pool is a community around software engineering processes, practices, and tools. Our aim is  to develop and evolve solutions in a model of shared maintenance to reduce cost of development, improve quality of the software, and bring them faster to users. We foster an active community in which members collaborate in an Inner Source approach to evolve solutions that suit their needs.  The community contains technical projects, for instance integrations between tools or automations of tasks in the software development lifecycle.

You can subscribe here.

Community

Open Pool enables and encourages collaboration and contribution among subscribers, among others by providing forums for discussing ideas, sharing code snippets, and reporting bugs. Subscribers also have the opportunity to vote on features or suggest improvements.

The community is governed by the Inner Source approach that applies Open Source principles within a restricted community (as opposed to in public): Members can use, modify, and redistribute modified versions of components within the community, and Inner Source defines the way of working, roles and responsibilities, and practices to encourage transparency and make it easy to contribute to each other’s software. Regular feedback loops are established to gather input from users and stakeholders, enabling continuous iteration and improvement of the software tools. This feedback-driven approach ensures that the tools remain relevant, user-friendly, and aligned with the evolving needs of the organisation.

Technical Projects

Projects focus on developing and maintaining utilities and components to improve the tool landscapes that subscribers rely upon, for instance to provide identity management across a tool landscape, automate tasks throughout the development pipeline. Also, we see a growing need to consolidate projects on point tools to reduce cost of ownership and to archive data for regulatory compliance and future reference before decommission legacy systems.

ASERVO Software and the community aim to provide regular updates and improvements to the software components. This updates can provide bug fixes, security and vulnerability patches, performance enhancements, and new features, based on subscriber feedback and community contributions.

Also, the community provides technical support to subscribers on a best effort basis to help them troubleshoot issues and overcome challenges encountered while using or modifying the software. This support is principally provided by ASERVO Software but can also be provided by knowledgeable community members and developers.

Best Practices, Blueprints, and Packaged Services

Complementing and shaping the technical projects is the know-how around state-of-the-art software development.  The community develops this know-how from three perspectives:

• • DevOps principles and practices, such as Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Development (CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and automation that help teams achieve faster time-to-market, higher quality software releases, increased agility and innovation, and greater efficiency and competitiveness.
  • DevSecOps augments the DevOps philosophy to integrate security practices throughout the development lifecycle. The community applies principles and practices, such as shift-left security, automation of security controls, and continuous monitoring.
  • Software supply chain management principles and practices, such as managing artifacts/binaries into structured repositories, on-going vulnerability scanning of those binaries, ensuring development teams rely strictly on components in those repositories to ensure security and compliance, maintain an SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) for components, as well as distribution and deployment of generated binaries.

Packaged Services

Beyond sharing blueprints and best practices in the community, ASERVO Software offers packaged services around those topics, such as:

CI/CD pipeline Automation – Design and automate your development pipeline.

• • DevSecOps Assessment – Analyse, assess, and review the current security practices, automation, and tools. Provide recommendations and roadmap for improvement.
  • DevOps Workshop
  • Artifact Management – Design your repository structure, organise artifact types, update strategies