This paper on Incentive Compatibility and Systematic Software Reuse provides several insights on incentives and organizational structure that will impact and influence systematic software reuse. A few questions and points to ponder:
- Are you tracking cross project dependencies with an eye towards developing and sharing reusable components? Is this word of mouth, best effort or more systematic and instutionalized?
- Do you understand the cost of systematic reuse? what is the cost of discovering and evaluating a component for a particular use case? what is the cost of developer training and learning curve?
- How is funding allocated for ongoing maintenance/upkeep/bug fixes etc. for reusable assets? In short – how do you keep the program humming – will it become sustainable?
- Which role will provide the curator or expertise with reusable asset integration? Which role will provide guidance on when to use and when not to use a particular component?
This paper provides several models for enabling and operationalizing systematic reuse. There are several organizational considerations to picking and adapting these models. Regardless of which model is picked it should become quite evident that enabling reuse isn’t a purely technical endeavour. It is much more than that – from understanding the true costs behind reuse to continuous governance – it takes considerable effort and lot of discipline to get returns.
Tagged: cost of reuse, organizational structure, software reuse, systematic software reuse, technical governance
