Reuse that pays

A company builds a software system capable of running a diesel engine in a week, and in one case over a weekend, as opposed to the full year that it used to take. Another company builds one of its typical systems with 13 software engineers instead of the more than 100 it once required, and at the same time decreases the systems defect rate ten-fold. Still another increases its software-intensive product offerings from four per year to 50 per year. Imagine being able to use one person to integrate and test 1.5 million source lines of Ada for a real-time command-and-control system onboard a ship, with safety-critical requirements? Or increasing software productivity four-fold over three years, as another company has done? These organizations all achieved their results through strategic software reuse. We software people have been promising the benefits of reuse for decades. Are we finally achieving a reuse strategy that lives up to its hype?