David J. Martin VP Product Management, MKS Inc - September 2002

Today, many software systems are made up of components that can be re-used in other applications. The reason for this is obvious; if a team has already developed code that works well, they don’t want to waste resources by building it repeatedly for subsequent releases or other purposes. Similarly, developers do not want to constantly resolve the same technical problems every release. In a time of scarce human and financial resources, code re-use through project sharing is a prudent way of managing software development, especially in a large enterprise that has many internal and customer-facing applications.