Posted by andy Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:34:00 GMT

A friend of mine used to say “that’s repetitive AND redundant”. Three reasons why reuse is really important: 1) Customer awareness: Our enterprise prospects see reuse (in various forms, components, products, services) as a high-priority organizational mission, above open source. It was interesting that IBM saw reuse at the component …

A friend of mine used to say “that’s repetitive AND redundant”.

Three reasons why reuse is really important:

1) Customer awareness: Our enterprise prospects see reuse (in various forms, components, products, services) as a high-priority organizational mission, above open source. It was interesting that IBM saw reuse at the component level (not the app level) as the biggest contributor to the productivity of their community development initiative.

2) Statistics: I have been eagerly reading a book called Software Assessments, Benchmarks, and Best Practices, by Capers Jones. It has amazing statistics showing that of all the practices that contribute to a difference in productivity between a great project and a bad one, reuse of software and other artifacts is the most important by a huge margin, contributing a 350% difference.

3) Scalability. Reuse is important at the level of a development team, an organization (for instance, the Massachusetts state government), and an industry (50 states) – even the global open source community.