Care About Risks

Why should you care about risks with reuse? Because, these risks are real not made up and can make the difference between success and failure for your development effort. Here are a few risks that spring to mind:

• Needless complexity

• Inflexible design/will cost too much to modify

• Domain irrelevance

• Inadequate documentation/training/awareness

• Ability to meet deadlines/dates (schedule risk)

• Increased development, testing, and maintenance costs

• Pursuit of technical elegance/architectural purity

These are not all the risks with reuse but the major ones that I have come across.

Now, what do you with these? You do what leaders do and that is address them head on. Instead of sulking about these you should plan and execute mitigation steps for these. Refactoring is the fundamental technique for addressing these risks! Take another look at the above list. You can use refactoring to handle most of these if not all of them.

• Needless complexity – build only what you absolutely need with just enough abstraction. Refactor needless layers and abstractions. Keep things as simple as possible.

• Inflexible design/will cost too much to modify – refactor your design to focus flexibility on the variations inherent in your problem domain. Not everything needs to be flexible!

• Domain irrelevance – Build only what is relevant to your domain. If you are not sure, don’t commit prematurely.

• Ability to meet deadlines/dates (schedule risk) – cannot take a reusable asset to the planned design target? Plan to pursue refactoring these in your future iterations

• Increased development, testing, and maintenance costs – don’t build domain irrelevant reusable assets. Every asset you build should be for a real business need. Refactor the rest so as to leverage existing solutions – watch your costs go way down.

• Pursuit of technical elegance/architectural purity – again, refactor imperfections over time. Think incremental and iterative.

I am not saying this will solve all your problems and address all the risks. But, it will get you on the right path. If you step back and focus on what is essential and what you know is likely to vary you can adjust your efforts accordingly.