Resisting the temptation to implement a story is very hard for a dev team – it is all too easy to get carried away in introducing a new idea as a reusable asset. However, these are the moments where you must pause and ask yourself a few basic questions before rushing to write code:
- Is this a one-off requirement or part of a recurring theme? Remember – when in doubt, don’t plan for reuse but continuously align and refactor your codebase. Use before reuse!
- Is there a confirmed consumer of this asset beyond the immediate project? If not, keep it in the originating project and promote it for reuse when you find another team or project that needs the functionality
- What are the likely variations that aren’t captured in the existing implementation? are they all really required for day 1, day N ? Don’t implement anything unless there is a business mandate to do so. It is very easy to add code wishing someone reuses it rather than refactoring a known good piece of functionality
- Do you have the bandwidth to develop unit tests, capture the right domain abstractions, and write developer facing quick start documentation? If not, resist the urge to prematurely introduce new code that ends up being technical debt
Tagged: software reuse, systematic reuse
