Hello,
Software reuse has been studied from a cognitive perspective by people
such as Francoise Detienne from Inria in France. Her latest book has
been translated into English recently (Software Engineering and
Psychology Programming, ISBN: 1852332530). I could also plug my
thesis (downloadable at :
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/fabricer/thesis.pdf.gz).
Outside of academia research, books such as Code Complete (ISBN:
1556154844) provide advice which has been tried and tested by large
amounts of programmers over the last 7 or so years, showing these points
could be as valid (if not more) than anything comming out of pure
academia research.
> Developers have to produce software in a very short time frame. Using
> existing software can save
> time and money, but modifying it requires that the new developers (the
> previous ones from the last
> product have usually burnt out or left the company) need to understand how
> it works.
This makes me wonder about the motivation of such companies. Rather than
tackling the issue of staff burnout, they look into new solution to
tackle its consequences. This is typical of management blindness.
Providing a suitable work environment will help companies to retain
their staff, thus not wasting away their human investment, and avoiding
personal tragedies (does nobody know that "burnout" sometimes means
"suicide"?). Surely avoiding this issue is not moral nor ethical.
See: Peopleware (ISBN: 0932633439, once again, many international
corporations followed the philosophy of this book to great success),
Rapid development (ISBN: 1556159005), Death March (ISBN: 0130146595).
Fabrice
