Em março de 1997 a revista CIO Magazine lançou uma série de reportagens sobre reuso de software. O formato do texto, não muito técnico, já deixa claro o seu objetivo no primeiro parágrafo. Como deve ser qualquer texto para CIOs, direto, objetivo.
Infelizmente ou felizmente somente em março de 2006, quase 10 anos depois, encontrei essas reportagens.
Maio de 2007 e vejo no Blog de SÃlvio Meira que as reportagens não estão mais disponÃveis.
Então disponibilizo a Ãntegra abaixo:
Special Report: Software Reuse – INTRODUCTION
Mar. 1, 1997 Issue of CIO Magazine
IS shops that institute component-based software development reduce failure, embrace efficiency and augment the bottom line. You’d think it would be easier to persuade people to try it.
By Miryam Williamson
Would you be the first passenger on an airliner whose parts have just come out of the R&D shop? Or would you prefer to board knowing the aircraft was designed and constructed with parts that have successfully kept planes airborne for years? Practicing engineers, whether they specialize in civil, mechanical, electrical or aerospace engineering, select from components whose characteristics have been tested and proven for safety and efficiency. Reusability is a fundamental principle of engineering.
By the turn of the century, observers predict, most application software will be built of reusable components. Component libraries will be considered important corporate assets. Development speed and quality will increase; time-to-market and maintenance costs will shrink dramatically. As career moves go, restructuring the IS shop for component-based development (CBD) looks like a sure winner. CBD is a technique by which applications are built from software modules designed for reuse. Modules can be subroutines, smaller applications or objects, which are packets of code that contain data and methods for manipulating that data.
It’s not too late to start designing software for reusability, but it’s not too early, either. The best news is this: Reusability hurdles are mainly cultural, not technological. Overcoming challenges to adoption is a matter of changing minds, not spending huge sums of money. But right now, most software developers have yet to take advantage of reusability. In most IS organizations, every project is still considered a whole new ballgame. The software developer who searches through code libraries for macros and subroutines that might be adapted for the project at hand is rare. While Paul G. Bassett, senior vice president of research and one of the founders of Netron Inc. in Toronto, offers an optimistic estimate of current software reuse-30 percent to 50 percent-CIOs queried for this article set that figure about 10 percentage points lower. And it’s probably no coincidence that some CIOs peg the failure rate for software projects at 60 percent; in fact, 25 percent never get delivered, says Charles B. Kreitzberg, president of Cognetics Corp., a software design and consulting firm in Princeton Junction, N.J. The rest, he says, come in late, over budget or both.
Component-based development will change that-and soon. CIOs who plan to retire or change careers within a year or two can safely ignore this advance in software creation technique, but others had better pay attention, unless they want to be blindsided by an outsourcer who offers to take over software development at a fraction of the cost, says Brian Morrow, director of CBD at Plano, Texas-based Texas Instruments Inc.
Of course, there will be initial investments in education and training (see “Once Is Not Enough,” page XX). Although components built with reuse in mind cost more at the outset, their cost drops dramatically when they are used in subsequent projects. Ready-made components are already available, and more are expected. “A market is emerging in readily available functionality that is dramatically cheaper than building it yourself,” Morrow says. “Today we see the off-the-shelf components selling at between one-third and one-fifth the cost of developing your own.” He predicts that ready-to-use component costs will drop to one-tenth that of home-grown modules over the next three years. By 2001, there will be a $7 billion componentware market, with about $2 billion in software and the rest in services, says Mike Blechar, research director of Gartner Group Inc.’s application development service in Stamford, Conn.
Savings aside, IS executives already involved in reusability projects cite a variety of benefits. At General Accident Insurance in Philadelphia, reusable components provide a uniform way of doing business across the company’s insurance lines, and maintenance costs are expected to decline. In addition, National Grocers Co. Ltd. in Toronto is counting on CBD to eliminate dependence on the mainframe (see “Avoiding the Point of No Reuse,”). Though the advantages are many, Netron’s Bassett cautions against seeing reuse as a goal in itself. “It is merely a means to many other more important ends that have bottom-line implications-things that are really important, such as improvements in quality and flexibility, and the reduction of complexity and time-to-market,” he says. “There is value both to the end user and the workings of the IS environment. Reuse is a gateway to those kinds of bottom-line issues.”
Bassett suggests that CBD is appropriate only at companies in which software is seen as a strategic weapon and not just a back-office function. “The answer to the question of appropriateness [for a company] is highly correlated with how long you could stay in business if your IT function was suddenly disabled,” he says. “[This question] focuses attention on the real business issues,” he adds. Companies that can survive without information technology for months or years can probably ignore the CBD strategy.
The journey to component-based development is not easy, says Wayne Ratz, vice president of application systems at General Accident Insurance. “But it’s one that everyone in IS is going to have to make over the next few years. It’s absolutely where things are going,” he says. “If you can’t make the change, you aren’t going to be able to support the business.”
- Miryam Williamson
Related posts:
- First Free Open Source Book on Software Reuse in the World
- RiSE Book- CRuISE Component Reuse in Software Engineering
- Software Reuse Evangelism
- How (7 years of) Eclipse Changed my Views on Software Development
- C.E.S.A.R lança LIVRO de REUSO de SOFTWARE como projeto ABERTO , com licença CREATIVE COMMONS
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