Code Reuse Inside Your Own Company

A short read over on Dr. Dobbs, Where Are the Clients In a SOA? made some good observations about the mindset of creating reusable SOA components, especially when the reuse is likely to occur in your own back yard.

"The best "enterprise architecture" plan will never be realized as long as developers assume the client of a piece of code is another piece of code."

"As software developers we are not very good customers of the work our colleagues do. We are quicker to search the Internet for a utility or example than we are to search our own internal repositories."

"More importantly, we aren't thinking about other developers when we create the code. We don't create interfaces that make it easy for people to use our code in ways we have not considered. We don't provide design-level abstractions that help other programmers and architects fit our solution into theirs. We don't market the code to the rest of the team or to other teams within the organization. We don't do any market research to make sure the nontraditional customers of our code are going to make the most of it. We don't package it in ways that also make it easy to use outside our intended use."

The emphasis is mine, although it should be yours, too.