Cost reduction and development speed-up through reusability: Evaluating experiences against a simplified model

Reuse can be the key to significant gains in productivity and development speed-up, and can yield savings with respect to several project cost items. Different kinds of reuse can be leveraged, ranging from simple source code "cut&paste" to architectural reuse. To the best of our knowledge there is few evidence in literature of real reuse experience in production environments, and previous work does not classify results according to a comprehensive taxonomy such as the one adopted here. This paper presents the main results of a seven-year experience conducted by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) Central Administration in developing and maintaining Information Systems, leveraging open standards, open source platforms and tools and exploiting different kinds of internal and external reuse1. Some of the most important software applications developed by our internal team are described here and figures are provided showing the benefits in terms of cost reduction and development speed-up.