Large-Scale Industrial Reuse to Reduce Cost and Cycle Time

All the changes in an organization's management, methods, and tools necessary to encourage reuse take time, delaying and sometimes wiping out the return on investment. We think that long-term reuse strategies must be based on short-term reuse successes. For this reason, our company -- Matra Cap Systemes -- founded its reuse strategy on pragmatic, opportunistic reuse-based projects.Here we report the results from two large industrial projects, in which project-based and cross-organizational reuse improved time-to-market, productivity, and quality (as measured through error rates). These positive results can be attributed to both reuse and the iterative nature of the development process. One project confirmed the interest of cross-organizational reuse. As a matter of fact, we record more and more projects that are reusing large parts of existing systems, although they come from different departments in the company.We now face another interesting consequence of our opportunistic reuse policy: several versions of similar modules, whose maintenance could be expensive if managed by different groups. For this reason, we are in the process of centralizing the maintenance of common code. We believe that our new internal-products policy will make a priori reuse easier in the long run.