oops reuse misuse – part 1

part 1 of infinity – introduction

One of the strongest motivations that is espoused for promoting object oriented programming is reuse. While object oriented programming languages provide features, such as encapsulation and inheritance, that enable better reuse, OOP has gotten a bad rap, because the discipline that is required to produce good software must address many concerns aside from reuse in order to be successful.

Reuse is a buzzword software professionals bandy about, when they promote certain software practices. It refers to the ability to incrementally grow software capability by building additional functions to augment what was already built previously. Development organizations like this idea, because it implies predictability, which is the holy grail of software methodology (quality process). If the additional effort required to build and test functionality can be made proportional only to the additional code being incrementally developed, then development can be highly predictable. This would be the key to projects being delivered on time and within budget.

Although reuse in this sense is a good motivation, nobody knows how to make it work. Very intelligent and highly respected individuals will say how to apply principles of reuse, but either they don’t know what they are talking about, or the people who apply their principles don’t understand what they should be doing. Or both. The state of the software industry is a testament to the fact that reuse strategies are being widely applied with a high degree of (and near total) failure. No one achieves anywhere close to the linearity of effort, predictability of process, and scalability of outcome that reuse is meant to achieve.

In an series of articles, of which this is the first, I would like to evaluate various reuse strategies, practices, and object oriented programming techniques. Stay tuned for more in this series.

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