The future of systematic software reuse

Summary form only. Systematic reuse represents a paradigm shift for software engineering. Systematic reuse will have a major impact on software engineering as a discipline, and on the software business as a whole. We speculate on where software reuse is headed. Systematic reuse will play a key role in the software industry in the next ten years and beyond. Companies that do the best job of engineering a domain will have a tremendous advantage over their competition and will likely come to dominate markets based on the domain. Reusable assets for a domain may well, then, be treated as corporate trade secrets. If so, it is unlikely that companies will share them. At the same time, a reuse industry that crosses organizational boundaries is rapidly developing. There is already a large market for reusable components, application generators and generator support tools, consulting, books and reports, and other products. This market is likely to grow at least an order of magnitude in the next decade. It seems then that reuse is a central technology around the world, and that we as a community will continue to develop systematic reuse methods and apply them to our organizations. The reuse market will continue to rapidly expand, and companies around the world will compete in this market.<
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