Link: http://www.etc-architect.com/?p=67
From ETC-Architect » IT Architect Global | Enterprise Architect, Global | IT Architect, Global
Often business cases of architects will contain the rule of reuse, especially if those architects are engineers. However there are two inherit problems in this area. the first is that of a business case. The assumption behind a business case is that we can predict the future and break down all complexities into a simple summation. this is a case of taking reductionism to its endpoint of fantasy, so this why I am not the biggest fan of business cases that do not at least contain many a strong amount of constraints and warnings, as well as to state all conclusions as probabilities instead of facts.
The second problem of business cases build on reuse is that reuse does not really take place as intentional process. Every engineer that is capable of his art will try to reengineer or refactor any code or any ideas before even attempting reuse and so often reuse really is not happening. That said however reuse is happening all the time, as people will reuse assets for all kind of situations often in areas were the solution was not intended to be used.
So the real problem is that of intentional reuse. Unintentional reuse on the other hand often also leads to unintentional consequences as something was never build to a certain job or that programmers reuse <aka copy & paste> some code written by someone else without understanding basic terms on persistency, performance aspects, security implications or compatibility. The only area where I have seen intentional reuse to work is by a clean implementation of basic concepts being properly embedded in a programming language such as CORBA is still being used by nicely hidden and made comfortable encapsulation.
