FAQ 4.15 What is the secret to achieving reuse?

Building a reuse culture.

Some aspects of reuse are technical (such as carrying out successful domain analysis and building extensible, domain-specific frameworks), but the real problems come from human issues. Developers need to lose the attitude that says, "I want to build my own infrastructure because it's more fun and enhances my career" and "I don't trust or want to understand someone else's work, so I'll do everything from scratch." If the human issues aren't resolved, the technology questions become immaterial.

Enlightened leadership and an appropriate reward system can sometimes overcome these problems, but sometimes the project team itself can foster the right attitude. In one case the developers decided that working together was important, and they used the word "big" to describe people and actions that contributed to reuse (as in "That is big of you") and conversely the word "small" to describe people and actions that were petty or self-centered. Thus the words "big" and "small" became an informal mechanism for the team to enforce and reinforce their culture in a reasonably nonthreatening way.

The architectural perspective is to recognize that reuse is much more than a technical question and that there are inherent limits on what is possible. There is no point in investing development effort to achieve reuse if the organizational culture will keep the reuse from actually occurring.