Incentive compatibility and systematic software reuse

Systematic software reuse has emerged as a promising route to improved soft ware development productivity and quality. Many large corporations have ini tiated systematic reuse programs, and many reuse frameworks have been devel oped to guide organizations in these efforts. Yet, in spite of this, system atic reuse in practice has been difficult to achieve. In this paper we argu e that a key inhibitor has been the incentive conflict inherent in traditio nal programs of reuse. We reach this conclusion based on an analysis of int erview data gathered from 15 projects across eight different sites in a com pany once viewed as a leader in the reuse movement. We found that one key c ontributor to the absence of widespread systematic reuse in this firm was a perception among project teams that reuse was incompatible with prevailing project team priorities and incentives, such as to complete projects on ti me and within budget. Based on this finding, we undertake a survey of diffe rent approaches to establishing reuse described in the literature, and anal yze them to determine whether incentive incompatibility is inherent in the nature of software reuse for larger organizations. We conclude that it is n ot, and provide guidance on how such organizations can design an incentive- compatible program of reuse, i.e., one that generates a climate in which de velopers and teams view reuse as having a more favorable "value proposition " according to the prevailing incentives operating at the team level. (C) 2 001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.