How John Wiley and Sons Uses GitHub

John Wiley and Sons, a publishing company with over 210 years of history, has connected researchers, educators, and professionals with the skills and resources they need to succeed. Today, software and digital resources are core components of the company. With 80 offices and facilities in 30 locations, Wiley helps customers in more than 200 countries solve some of the world's biggest challenges.

The Challenge: Breaking Down Silos

Over the years, Wiley's globally distributed developers worked on hundreds of applications, many acquired through company acquisitions. Teams became increasingly siloed, often unaware of the tools and resources created elsewhere in the organization. The company's external commitment to open collaboration and open source—contributing code to the Apache Software Foundation and the W3C, and funding existing open source projects—contrasted sharply with internal barriers.

In 2017, Director of Site Reliability Engineering Fedor Terlov, Security Engineer Alec Sumarokoff, and Principal Architect Benjamin Young set out to repair these divisions and move toward one team, one codebase. They wanted to help Wiley engineers collaborate internally much the same way they worked on open source projects—a strategy known as innersource.

The Solution: GitHub Enterprise

The team started by shifting development from Subversion and CVS to a self-hosted Git server. When that test server became a central hub for software development in just a few months, it was clear they were on the right track. "We talked to a few vendors and decided to stop hosting ourselves," Terlov says. "We opted for GitHub Enterprise for the major functionality: pull requests, easy merging, team collaboration, and overall simplicity."

Now GitHub is at the center of an evolving developer experience. Whether teams use Slack or Microsoft Teams, JIRA or GitHub Projects, they're all on GitHub. With one point of entry for any process related to infrastructure and application development, QA, security, and infrastructure teams work from a single source of truth.

Results: Faster Development and Better Code

The shift has accelerated time to production. Wiley finds it easier to debug code, find bottlenecks, and move new features and functionality to production. "It's accelerated time to production," confirmed Terlov.

Visibility has also improved code quality. When software is open to more developers within Wiley, its creators benefit from socializing it. "Suddenly developers are buttoning up the structure of their code—open source and innersource act as a forcing function to get the details right and ready for more eyes," Young explained.

This was the case with Teasy, the team's open source testing framework. Originally an internal tool built on Selenium, a Quality Engineering team expressed interest in opening up their code so other developers could discover, benefit from, and contribute back to it.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Teams across Wiley now share and collaborate on code regardless of business vertical, using cross-functional teams that don't map to particular business units but meet to review each other's code. Frontend developers and API developers, for instance, work together to raise visibility and encourage feedback between teams.

"The first step was getting API teams to share their documentation with each other, so we could all see it," Young says. "The next is creating an API hub that generates documentation. It's all with the goal of raising visibility and encouraging feedback between teams."

Terlov sees visibility as imperative for both feedback and team culture. "But with GitHub, we see an application from the beginning," said Terlov. In some IT organizations, teams may not see an application until it's ready for production, with months of development history buried in undocumented decision making.

Governance and Security

Moving to the cloud and "infrastructure as code" improved governance by enabling integration with SSO services like Azure Active Directory, allowing fine-tuned permissions and centralized team management. GitHub provides a single, secure location for all code while balancing security with the openness needed to invite contributors from across the company.

"GitHub has provided a single, secure location for all our code for all our developers within our organization. It's immensely more collaborative when everyone has the ability to see each other's code," Terlov explained.

Looking Forward

Moving away from 200 years of organizational divisions takes time, but Wiley believes it will pay off. Beyond getting the right tools in place, changing how an enterprise builds software requires a shift in how everyone talks about software and projects. Developers need to learn not only a toolset but also a new way of working together.

"We're asking people to step back from squirreling away time. They may be busy shipping, but they will be so much more productive and write much better code if they simply talk to each other," Young explained.

For a centuries-old company, the shift from closed-off repositories to transparent development helps teams stay efficient while providing a new perspective on their code. "We're not only saving time," said Young, "We're also starting to move beyond our roots and reach our potential as a technology company."