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From: locke@paradyne.com (Richard Locke)
Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: How to pay for reusable software
Message-ID: <1991Apr5.040312.29351@pdn.paradyne.com>
Date: 5 Apr 91 04:03:12 GMT
References: <1991Apr3.231849.13410@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
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In article <1991Apr3.231849.13410@m.cs.uiuc.edu> johnson@cs.uiuc.EDU (Ralph Johnson) writes:

Ralph asks some good questions:

<...how can we afford to pay the costs of developing reusable software?  

<Does anybody have... (better yet) references to papers that discuss it?

Though the book is at work & I'm at home, I recall the "Programmer
Productivity" by Capers Jones has a reasonably extensive discussion
on the economics of reusable software.  Jones points out the the
world leaders in software productivity are good at reusing both
designs and code.  He goes through a sample exercise of justifying
a large initial investment and showing the payback.


-dick

p.s. Note that Jones defines productivity (I'm paraphrasing here) in
terms of functionality delivered per unit of effort on the "version"
of the delivered software.  You could define productivity differently
(like new lines of code/unit time) and this changes ;-)