🚀 go-pugleaf

Being real process-oriented lately, I'd like to put this reuse discussion in
a broader setting.  Many assertions have been made about the possibilities
and issues of reuse, each based on unstated or only partially stated
assumptions about the process and setting of the supposed act of reuse.  In
fact, there can be many such settings, each implying different constraints
and characteristics of the components, the collection of them, and the
"reuser".  For example,

    The personal toolkit: an experienced machanic collects high-quality
    tools, assumes responsibility for them, and takes them with him/her.
    Having created a module to solve a problem, an experienced software
    engineer might well generalize the solution a bit, polish the
    implementation and the interface description, and drop it in the kit.

    The corporate resource: rather than continually reinventing solutions to
    recurring problems, the company creates a library and supporting staff
    to capture the solutions and make them available to new projects.  Note
    that there's likely some domain leverage here; the company's projects
    will often cover a lot of the same ground.

    The commercial product: this is what seems to have been the assumption
    behind most of the discussions so far.  Even here, there are many
    possible relationships among the component and library creators,
    sellers, and buyers, and probably many possible types of "component"
    (how about selling detailed designs or generic sources like MacApp?)

In all these settings, I think that the major problems are organizational,
psychological, and institutional -- meeting the differing goals of the
various folks involved.  It'll probably take some "process prototyping" to
work these out.  The technical problems that arise will be solved as part of
all this (and some technical issues will turn out to be non-problems).

What I'd like to see is some reuse success and horror stories along this
line: what was the setting and process, how did it work out, what problems
arose and how were they solved (if they were)?


--
Don Dwiggins				"Solvitur Ambulando"
Ashton-Tate, Inc.
dwiggins@ashtate.uucp