"The Organization" or "Software Reuse in a Business Environment"

Leader: Kevin Benner, Andersen Consulting
Scope:
We have looked at the specific case of a contract software development company called AC (remarkedly similar to Andersen Consulting) and their focus on the Utilities Industry. The general situation is that AC has developed a customer service package (including billing, invoicing, service requests, etc.) for several utility companies. AC has in place an reuse plan which it is executing.

A case study was provided which describes the business environment, current assets, and reuse plan. This was made available to participants before the workshop. At the workshop, the working group session began with an overview of the business environment. At this point we began a mediated discussion to uncover additional information. We then broke up into a few groups to refine/replace the existing reuse plan, after which we then came back to share our results and discuss the relative merits of the various plans. We voted to merge the best ideas into a new plan, with which we are prepared to submit to various scenarios for analaysis and probably refinement.

Goals:
1. To analyze a specific business case with the intention of developing a reuse plan for that environment.

2. To evaluate the plan with respect to various scenarios.

3. To highlight how one evolves a reuse plan as the business environment changes.

4. To describe the reuse plan and its refinements based on the scenarios.

Working Group Final Report