Every day programmers duplicate software written previously. I often wonder how much better (in quality and quantity) the software world would be if programmers didn't duplicate effort. This article is about the benefits and techniques of software reuse, some obvious and some not so obvious.
I don't know how to prevent or undo the
"forks" of free projects or how to eliminate the "not invented here" attitudes in some developers' groups (commercial or open source). Those groups may not be interested in software reuse. But, for most of the rest of us, adapting and using the existing code of others means less time debugging and more time to add features.
Friends don't let friends reinvent the wheel Reusing existing software saves more than keystrokes. Software development isn't over when code is sent to the compiler for the first time. The efforts to test, debug, and revise code often combine to be the majority of software effort.
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