Survey Results

The wording of the poll question was not meant to be confusing.

I would like to state that when this poll was suggested, the intent was to focus on the developer's UTILITIES, rather than the third party libraries or components that would go into one of your end products.

For exmaple, would your company have you write a parser, or would you use PCYacc and PCLex or a similar product?

Would they have you code a front end to MSI, or would they buy InstallShield for Windows Installer or Wise or a similar product?

Would they have you write a text editor, or do they get you the one you prefer to use, such as CodeWiright or or a similar product?

I'd just like to say that coding your own tools is not necesarilly reinventing the wheel, our company used to buy utilities and libreries but I made them stop since every single one of them was bloated with functions we didn't really need and every single one of them had bugs in the small part we did need. It proved to be much more effective to write the code in the house - it gave us full control over what that part if doing and allowed us to fix bugs

The questions are a little problematic, as they seem to imply that code reuse requires buying off the shelf products. This is not the whole story. I have used very heavy code reuse for years, but have rarely used off the shelf products. The reuse has come from developing internal code libraries, and using them in multiple projects

The same happens here, they have a very huge library, that has been developed as need, and which fits our own requirements, this library is used in most of the projects, and most off the shelf solutions, aren't good enough, or have too many useless features to us.

Totally agree. We are in a similar position where we reuse quite a lot of our own code. It seems that there is a misunderstanding about what code reuse is, especially among marketing and leaders. I've lost count of how many times I've tried to tell managers that buying an off-the-shelf product doesn't necessary mean less development time. It is often the case where the off-the-shelf product covers 30-50% of the requirements, and you have to spend quite an amount of time adapting the component into the 50-70% of the business code that is missing. Often you end up patching the component code (requires source license), making a total mess of the object oriented design

Option	Votes	%
We chronically reinvent the wheel	58	22.14
We often rewrite, though we occasionally buy off the shelf products	97	37.02
An even split	59	22.52
We mostly by off the shelf solutions, only occasionally writing our own as needed.	43	16.41
We never write our own. If a solution doesn't exist, then we modify the problem until one does!	5	1.91
Total	262	100%

Code Reuse - does it happen? [Edit]