The Case Against Accidental Reuse

"Accidental Reuse" is a term that I've been throwing around a lot lately. In layman's terms, it means, "If you build it, they will come." This notion has been disproved in virtually every field (except in the Field of Dreams) - and I suggest it is even more unlikely in the field of software engineering.

It has been my observation that most software engineering teams suffer from a bad case of 'not invented here' syndrome. We work in a discipline that is not regulated and the certifications are a joke at best. Most programmers don't have engineer training - and most architects have learned from doing and observing. In short, there are good reasons for one team to not fully trust the output of another team. We also have the issues of human entitlement. It's been my observation that a generation of software developers has been created who feel that they are entitled to 'not be bored' and 'deserve cool problems'. Once again, we have people who feel the need to create new stuff - not reuse.

I could go on - but I'm guessing there is no need. Anyone who has been in the industry has seen the problems. This leads back to my original point - accidental reuse is a bad idea. And here, I'm as guilty as the guy sitting next to me on the last 20 panels where I've been on telling the world to 'build it and they will come'... design for reuse... create services... register the services... and they will come. Apologies.

Most SOA report cards that I get still show metrics on: how many services there are, how many consumers there are or how many times the service has been called. These are fine metrics but in my humble opinion leave behind one very important metric: how many unknown consumers use the service? (accidental reuse, planned reuse & expropriated reuse)

Now it gets interesting. My aggregate data shows that most services are built with one consumer in mind and almost 80% of all transactions go through the original consumer. Less than 2% go through 'accidental channels'. Of the 2%, most of those were for externally facing systems (B2B) where advance knowledge of consumption is limited or they were in 'technical' or 'entity' services where they offered limited functionality and in some cases, limited return.

The remaining 18% go toward 'planned reuse' or 'expropriated reuse'. This number is too low - but this is the opportunity. More on this later...

Coming next:

- The Case for Planned Reuse

- The Case for Expropriated Reuse (right of eminent domain)