The Shape of Code

Code reuse is one of those things that sounds like a winning idea to those outside of software development; those who write software for a living are happy to reuse other peoples’ code but don’t want the hassle involved with others reusing their own code. From the management point of view, where is the benefit in having your developers help others get their product out the door when they should be working towards getting your product out the door?

Lots of projects get canceled after significant chunks of software have been produced, some of it working. It would be great to get some return on this investment, but the likely income from selling software components is rarely large enough to make it worthwhile investing the necessary resources. The attractions of the next project are soon appear more enticing than hanging around baby-sitting software from a cancelled project.

Cloud services, e.g., AWS and Azure to name two, look like they will have a big impact on code reuse. The components of a failed project, i.e., those bits that work tolerably well, can be packaged up as a service and sold/licensed to other companies using the same cloud provider. Companies are already offering a wide variety of third-party cloud services, presumably the new software got written because no equivalent services was currently available on the provider’s cloud; well perhaps others are looking for just this service.

The upfront cost of sales is minimal, the services your failed re-purposed software provides get listed in various service directories. The software can just sit there waiting for customers to come along, or you could put some effort into drumming up customers. If sales pick up, it may become worthwhile offering support and even making enhancements.

What about the software built for non-failed projects? Software is a force multiplier and anybody working on a non-failed project wants to use this multiplier for their own benefit, not spend time making it available for others (I’m not talking about creating third-party APIs).