In the short term, the focus of reuse measurement will be on cost benefits and return on investment of reuse (compared to no reuse), and certification of parts. Reuse programs are frequently initiated based upon anecdotal claims, with little understanding of the context from which those anecdotes arise. A primary short-term goal is agreement within the reuse community on what comprises reuse of an artifact, allowing reasonable comparisons between projects and organizations. Differentiating between verbatim and adaptive reuse and accounting for these distinctions in cost models to adequately estimate effort for design with reuse need to be addressed quickly so that managers can clearly see the benefits derived from reuse.
We see near-term results primarily in what to count, how to count it, and how to assign cost and savings to what is counted. These results will be achieved on software artifacts that generally resemble the traditional products of the software life cycle, rather than on the results of domain engineering efforts currently underway. The deployment of domain architectures in practical application systems is only now becoming clear.