3.1 Strategic Reuse Management

Reuse management is the process of organizing, monitoring, and directing the efforts of a project team that will lead to reuse on a project either the reuse of existing or purchased items. Strategic reuse management takes it one step further by recognizing that effective reuse occurs at the organization/enterprise-level, not just at the project level, making reuse an infrastructure management issue. Steve Adolph, in section 3.4.1 "Whatever Happened to Reuse?" ( Software Development, November 1999), describes the fundamentals of reuse in his description of the implementation of a simple class to simulate dice. He masterfully shows that building something to make it reusable is significantly harder than building it to meet your specific needs at the time. He argues that a company working to create reusable components will initially be beaten to the marketplace, but will have a long-term advantage over their competitors. He also describes the concept of domain analysis similar conceptually to the enterprise/organizational architectural modeling process that I describe in The Unified Process Elaboration Phase, Vol. 2 of this series.

Reuse is hard.

In section 3.4.2 "Seduced by Reuse" ( Software Development, September 1998), Meilir Page-Jones, author of Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML (Page-Jones, 2000), provides a dose of reality to anyone that believes reuse comes free with object/component technology. He looks at the entire lifecycle for reuse, arguing that reusability has an ongoing cost beyond its initial price of acquisition because you need to...