The Systematic Software Reuse Roadmap

In an earlier post, I outlined the four key ingredients for agile software reuse. One of which is the reuse roadmap. In this post I want to share an example roadmap and illustrate how they tie into other business and IT objectives. The idea is to start at the ad-hoc state (where there is little or no reuse) and move to truly utilizing systematic reuse across multiple projects.

Phase 1-Ad-hoc – In this initial phase there is little or no awareness of reusable assets, and there is very little customer integration expertise. Consumers have low awareness of what assets are available. Systematic reuse efforts not considered and there is a lack of alignment between project deliverables, reuse strategy, and business objectives. Applications within the same domain do not share assets i.e. there is a lot of duplicate code.

View Reuse Roadmap

Phase 2-Aware – In the second phase, legacy capabilities and processes are mined for building assets. Agile practices are minimally aligned to the reuse strategy. Consumers seek reusable assets for applications in the domain and rudimentary product lines take shape. Communication about reusable assets have improved and awareness is increasing.

Phase 3-Ready – In this phase, asset inventory expands task, entity, and utility capabilities. User stories are analyzed within a product line context and additional assets are built iteratively. Agile practices specifically code reviews, refactoring, iteration planning, and pair programming used to identify and refine assets in a continuous fashion. Consumers increasingly use reusable assets to build applications and start to co-create assets. Additionally, assets are used across multiple applications in the domain. A few business process flows start to leverage reusable assets.

Phase 4-Systematic – This is when your systematic reuse program starts to really reap rewards. Asset inventory expands to include additional capabilities in your domain. Assets are used to automate many more business processes and they provide variability mechanisms to meet business needs. User stories and iteration planning are well aligned with reuse strategy which facilitate iterative reusable asset development. Additionally, several assets built by refactoring legacy capabilities and communication about reusable assets are available. Finally, consumers are actively engaged in asset co-creation, retrieval, and consumption and supported by a mature integration function.

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