Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules

Managing the Risks of Reuse

Reuse programs generally improve quality and productivity and lower cost. At the project level, reuse tends to reduce risk because less of the product needs to be hand-coded, and the quality of reused components is generally higher than that of one-off components. At the organization level, however, a family of risks clusters around the difficulty of predicting which components will need to be reused.

Wasted effort. Creation of reusable components costs two to three times as much as creation of a one-off component. Once the component is developed, you have to use it at least two or three times just to break even. Ted Biggerstaff calls this the "Rule of Three": before you receive any benefit from reusing a component, ...