The broken promise of re-use

Re-use is the holy grail of IT: whenever a new architectural paradigm comes to IT town, “re-use” is one of the core arguments why to go for that paradigm. The business sales pitch typically goes like this: “Switching to will cost some money upfront but due to the re-use it enables it will soon pay back”.

I do not know about your experiences but I have never really seen it working the promised way. No matter if you look at Object-orientation, CORBA, Component-based architectures, EJB, SOA, you name it: re-use was accomplished to a lot smaller degree than promised, which meant that the promised business case never got realized. Additionally, very often brittle and tightly coupled systems emerged after a while that were very hard to change and operate, i.e., the business case started to turn into its opposite. But fortunately, at this point in time usually the next holy-grail paradigm showed up and the cycle started over again.

And today? Currently, microservices are the paradigm de jour, and – of course again – re-use is the business case promise that accompanies it regularly. Will it work this time? Have we finally found the long promised silver bullet?

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