Introducing architecture-centric reuse into a small development organization

Reuse promises cost-effective development and maintenance of software systems. Profiting from reuse, however, requires an upfront investment into creating building blocks to be reused by applications. When therefore required resources are limited, creating reusable building blocks practically often means migrating existing software assets into reusable components while concurrently realizing new developments. This pragmatic approach, which is especially often found in small organizations, often frustrates the vision of successful reuse across similar products. This paper, however, presents a success story of iteratively introducing architecture-centric development at Wikon GmbH. This small German company develops remote monitoring and controlling devices with a small team of three engineers only. The presented approach for adopting systematic reuse eventually reduced effort for development and testing by more than 35% without any decline in quality.