Standard reuse practices: many myths vs. a reality

m Several myths about standard software reuse practices are reviewed here. We examine how each myth has been addressed at Sodalia, a company with practical experience with reuse over the past few years. Sodalia has embraced standard reuse as a key strategic imperative to reach its objectives of highquality, rapidly deployed telecommunications software applications. Sodalia, which is qualified at ISO-9001, has been assessed at level 2 of the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (currently seeking level 3) and is deeply invested into the definition and deployment of a corporate-wide standard reuse program that makes it among the leading reuse practitioners in Europe. bject technologies have reached a level of maturity at which companies in Europe and the United States have adopted and applied them to industrial applications for a sufficiently long period of time to assess benefits such as quality and adaptability. However, benefits reaped from software reuse seem more difficult to attain, and have not been demonstrated on a significant scale. Despite this, reuse is widely recognized as one of the major factors in enhancing software development, in terms of both reduced time-to-market and quality improvement. Other advantages include productivity improvement (through shared maintenance), interoperability/compatibility (ensured by uniform behavior of a family of applications), standardization (standards are embedded inside reusable components), and capture of domain knowledge (during domain analysis). The complexity of software reuse is not due to the inherent complexity of individual reuse activities, which are often relatively simple and well understood—the difficulty lies in the large number of technical and managerial issues, which must be tackled simultaneously, and their interdependencies. Moreover, the impact of reuse on organization, management, strategy, marketing, business processes, software development, technologies, corporate culture, communication is often either underestimated or excessively emphasized. As a result software reuse is seen as a holy grail, unreachable to many. We want to review several myths about software reuse, which often act as roadblocks to widespread adoption of reuse as standard software engineering practice. We examine how each myth has been addressed at Sodalia, a three-year software development joint venture between Bell Atlantic (U.S.A.) and Telecom Italia. The company has embraced systematic reuse as a key strategic imperative to reach its objectives of high-quality, rapidly deployed telecommunications software applications.