When it comes to new projects, the last thing you want to do is continually reinvent the wheel. By reusing existing software components, you can save time, reduce costs, and improve product quality. Let’s take a closer look at how adopting a modular mindset can support your business goals!
How to Successfully Reuse Software Components
First, step back and look at what you’re trying to build. Identify the components needed to make the system work and how they would fit together in a modular architecture.
Assess and Decide: Buy or Build
Consider the larger building blocks. Decide if you want to buy or build each component. Sometimes, buying from a competitor is the most cost-effective option–just ask Apple; they buy components from Samsung. Engineering your own components isn’t always the answer. For example, do you think GM makes its own tires? Of course not.
You might need specific components that require a particular set of skills (as Liam Neeson would say). If you have a large and varied software engineering team, you may already have the needed experience in the relevant areas of specialization. If you do, you can build these yourself. If not, you may need to buy or outsource the components it doesn’t make sense – or isn’t possible – to build on your own.
By taking a modular approach, you ensure that each element or subsystem is properly engineered, whether by your team or someone else. The quality depends on the experience, skills, and investment the builder puts into it. The old adage “garbage-in, garbage-out” applies here.
Build it Right
If you’re going to build it, build it right. Don’t just slap a mess of spaghetti code together to get something to market. Your product needs to be built from various modules. For each module, decide if you should buy or build. Consider if there is a component you can license from a vendor or a partner that fits your economic model and business goals as well as your technology set.
Measure By the Four Universal Outcomes
Whatever you do, from component selection to partner selection and beyond, measure your end result by the four universal outcomes necessary for financial success.
The end result has to be:
- Stable
- Scalable
- Profitable
- Serviceable
If your commercial product or platform meets these qualifications, you will succeed in the long run. But missing any one of these qualifications will in every case lead to serious problems and eventual failure.
Why You Should Consider Reusability
If you’re buying a component, you naturally want to get the most mileage out of it. Whether it’s labor or licensing, you want the maximum return on your investment. Reusability is key to controlling costs in the long run and maximizing your return on invested capital.
When you’re building a component, it’s easy to overlook reusability. Many companies view R&D as a fixed cost, ignoring the potential superior returns from reusing what’s developed. This blind spot can lead to missed opportunities for greater efficiency and value creation.
Put your engineering hat on for a moment and look at the manufacturing industry. Manufacturers consistently reuse components when they build new products, saving time and costs and reducing risk. Part and component reuse across their product portfolio is tracked very carefully as it has a massive impact on profitability. Software engineering should adopt the same mindset.
What Should Be Emphasized in Reusable Components
Engineer it correctly.
Component reuse is a strategic decision. Good engineers know that building a good component or module that can be used again and again means they don’t have to keep doing the same work over and over.
Every component is a product in itself.
When you engineer for reuse, you’re deciding that each component will be a miniature product that can be serviced, maintained, and enhanced.
Suppose you’re building a solution and discover a component needs to be enhanced to solve a problem. Do you make a customized version for this solution? No. You simply enhance the component, then version and manage it like you would any other product. You just happen to be using this component to build other products.
Deliver more value.
Thinking of components as products increases their value. Reusability leads to higher development velocity, better customer experience, higher baseline quality, and fewer compatibility issues. By reusing components of your software, you add value to all the products that use them, not just the product itself. This strategy helps you deliver better core functionality and more value to your customers.
Tips to Maximize Reusability
Modern software development culture often neglects component reusability. If you want to see reusable components, you need to demand them from your engineering team. Reusability is a fundamental aspect of delivering a good return on your R&D investment—it’s the exact opposite of building throwaway code or building something quick and dirty.
If you build one solution, it’s not the only solution you’ll be building. With thoughtful design, large parts of an existing solution can be reused in future projects. This isn’t about copying and pasting code – that’s always the last resort. Copy-pasting leads to maintaining multiple copies of similar code, which affects profitability and serviceability and magnifies technical debt. Considering that maintenance of existing assets can consume upwards of 80% of your R&D budget, it’s simply not a good use of your resources.
The Nomenclature of Building for Reusability
Let’s get a little abstract and think about code organization. What customers buy is a product. That product is built on a platform, but what the customer is buying and paying for is a product.
As new requirements arise (new features, capabilities, enhancements, etc.), you and your development team decide which modules need modification to support them. Design the original modules as part of your overall platform vs. part of a product. Modules that are part of your platform should be built for reusability.
Modules should also be named accordingly. If a component is product-specific, bake in the name of that product into the component name. And if a component is going to be more universal and part of your underlying platform, embed the platform name into that component name. This will continue to drive you naturally to think about things in the right way.
This nomenclature drives the code organization, which then maximizes reusability. What you name things carries weight, even if you don’t realize that initially.
Architectural Planning is Your Friend
Reusability isn’t just about what one developer does; it’s bigger. Architectural decisions can be supported by asking:
- What components will go into this product?
- Do you have a defined software architecture?
- What are all the necessary components?
- Do you have a blueprint or a roadmap?
- Does everyone understand their roles and responsibilities?
If you’re going to build something, you need to understand the pieces that comprise the whole. Define your architecture and break it down into individual components. Understand what parts are needed as a group. You can’t achieve reusability by going straight from the whiteboard to the keyboard.
Design and develop a C4-level architecture diagram before a single line of code is built. This can be done in days and involves identifying involved personas and their interactions with the solution. From there, it’s all about peeling back the onion so you can understand what pieces are necessary. Once you’ve defined your component set, the next question to ask yourself is how to design and engineer it for future reuse.
Lessons from the Automobile Industry
Let’s return to the example of automobile manufacturing to understand the real value of reusing software components.
Go to any major automobile manufacturer, and you will immediately see a wide variety of car models. One single manufacturer could have 50 different models. But do they have 50 different engines? Absolutely not.
The time and cost of creating a completely bespoke solution, or a completely unique engine and components, for every single car model, would be insane. The cost of these custom vehicles would be outrageous; they would be priced out of the market for most people. Automobile manufacturers figured this out early.
Embracing a modular architecture that maximizes component sharing and reuse is the only way to deliver high-quality products to the market faster than your competitors and still keep margins high and risk low. This is true whether you’re building cars or enterprise software.
Instead of starting from scratch every time, let’s talk more about how you can use this modular mindset of reusing software components to support your business goals. For us, the belief in modular, reusable components goes deep; in fact, it’s literally in our name (Modularis = Modular Information Systems).
Final Thoughts
First, don’t be alarmed or overwhelmed. Reusability is an ethos you can foster in your organization. Start by deciding which components in your architecture should be platform-level and which should be product-specific. Embracing reusability means you’re going to be assembling products rather than building them from the ground up. Remember that if you want the best combination of low risk and high return, you have to engineer your platform and products thoughtfully (you can’t just slap them together). Yes, this takes a bit more up-front thinking, but it also maximizes your return on invested capital, reduces risk, and uses your most expensive resource – labor – far more effectively and efficiently. You’ll improve product quality by relying on trustworthy, proven, high-quality components, and reduce your maintenance costs to boot.
With this approach, the unique custom work required to deliver a given product is significantly reduced, allowing you to focus on maximizing its value. You get a higher-quality product out the door in less time, for less money, with less risk and better ROI.
At Modularis, 40% of the final code in our customers’ products comes pre-built in the form of our platform libraries, and another 40% is automatically generated by our generative AI tools. This means 80% of their code is ultimately managed and maintained by us, with reusability built in at every level. The patterns we establish are easy for their engineering staff to follow. Our customers own 100% of their IP, and every single one of their products is stable, scalable, profitable, serviceable, and a case study in reusability.
Are your software components optimized for reusability? Download the 5 Essentials of Software Modernization as your first step toward finding out now.