Or is it the developers themselves? We can't blame the pointy-haired bosses for this one. If you explain the basic concepts of reusable code to management, most would agree it's a great idea. Building something once, so you don't have to build it repeatedly? Easy to find the upside here. Team conflicts can also contribute to it, which is usually people disagreeing about who gets to determine what code is shared.
Developers themselves can also be opposed to it, due to not having enough time to build them. All of these are contributing factors to lack of adoption, but the question you should ask is do we need reusable code libraries at all?
If you have tasks your developers are building that contain code you can use for something else, you put that code in its own "library" to use later. This can be a DLL, a folder of snippets, a Node module, whatever. Connecting to a database? There's no reason to write that code for every piece of software that accesses a database. It's easy. You take a function and if it's abstract enough, parameterize it and make it available for other projects to use.
When you start your project, you don't have to write code to connect to the database; pull the library and enter your parameters. Here are some upsides:. These are all great reasons to use shared libraries. Countless articles and books have been written about code reuse, and most of you are familiar with them.
The biggest selling point for this is not having to code "boring stuff" over and over and have wild variations of the same methods in the wild. This frees up time to work on exciting features. This falls in line with the DRY principle of software development : Don't repeat yourself.
Why isn't everyone doing this? Your organization may avoid shared libraries for a good reason. Not every project or team benefits from this, and it's not the magic bullet to solve all development problems. Inheritance Functions Libraries Forking And it continues with many other frameworks being formulated every day and new paradigms being designed every decade and being used.
But I would like to explain a few of these and why they're better and so on. Finally, it would be clear, why the DRY rule is better and how it supports the developmental process and makes it easy to debug our applications efficiently. You should also know that I am not going to demonstrate the entire paradigm, I will just describe the use of the paradigm in code-reuse.
Inheritance Inheritance has been in the programming world for quite a long time and is overly used in Object-Oriented Programming paradigms. This paradigm lets you use the base class's functions and members in other classes An Animal class is often used to describe this behavior. An Animal is used to inherit from for a Lion and a Human and many other types of Animals, each with their own different functions, like a Lion can roar and Humans can speak, but they all have something similar, they can all walk.
So it is not necessary to write a walk function for all of these objects separately. You can instead create this function for an Animal and use it in your derived classes, Lion, Human and so on. However, after the initial investment, development cycles have a jump start to potentially decrease development time by months versus the traditional embedded software design cycle. The long-term benefits and cost savings usually overshadow the upfront design costs along with the potential to speed up the development schedule.
Developing firmware with the intent to reuse also means that developers may be stuck with a single programming language. How does one choose a language for software that may stick around for a decade or longer? Using a single programming language is not a major concern in embedded software development as one might initially think. The most popular embedded language, ANSI-C, was developed in and has proven to be nearly impossible to usurp. Figure 2 shows the popularity of programming languages, for all uses and applications, dating back to Despite advances in computer science and the development of object-oriented programming languages, C has remained very popular as a general language and is heavily entrenched in embedded software.
When and if the Internet of Things IoT begins to gain momentum, C may even begin to grow in its use and popularity as millions of devices are developed and deployed using it.
Developing portable and reusable software becomes a viable option when one considers the steady and near constant use that the C language has enjoyed in industry for developing embedded systems. When a development team considers the timelines, feature needs and limited budgets for the product development cycle, developing portable code should be considered a mandatory requirement. The decision to develop portable firmware should not be taken lightly.
In order to develop truly portable and reusable firmware, there are a few characteristics that a developer should review and make sure that the firmware will exhibit. When new projects are started in an organization, it makes sense to identify parts specific to the application and other parts that can be reused from earlier projects.
Code reuse is a practice that reduces development time and effort since we're reusing existing code rather than writing from scratch. Code reuse is not limited to within an organization. Languages often ship with built-in functions and standard libraries. Third-party libraries add functionalities to these. When developers write applications, they make use of these libraries. There are two approaches to code reuse: design and implement code with the expectation of future reuse; identify and refactor when we see opportunities for immediate reuse.
The industry is divided over which of these two approaches is the better one. Some experienced developers have shared useful tips about how best to adopt each approach. Suppose we're building an accounting application. Obviously it has a lot of business logic related to the domain of accounting. But it also does user authentication, interfaces to a database and logs errors: these are features that are not specific to accounting.
In fact, other applications such as shopping cart or content management may have similar requirements. It therefore makes sense to build these components once and reuse them across applications.
Thus, we could have a shared library that connects to a database. This library is then reused across applications that need such a connection. Likewise, separate libraries can be created for authentication or logging, and reused across applications. By reusing code this way developers can focus on the core business logic of their apps instead of "reinventing the wheel". If reusable code is well tested, it improves overall product quality.
Reuse can be vertical within an application domain or horizontal across application domains. Reuse is not just about code. We can reuse other software artefacts including requirements, architecture, design models, test reports, etc.
An application can be decomposed into components, each fulfilling a specific purpose. A component hides its complexity behind an interface. Reuse happens via such an interface. Such components could be views, models, controllers, data access objects, or plugins. When a component is deployed independently, it's called a service. Other applications or services can call it. Thus, reuse happens at the service level. When components are shared across multiple applications and systems, they can be packaged and distributed as API s or libraries.
Platforms and frameworks extend this philosophy by bringing together many useful API s or libraries. Another form of reuse is at the level of source code. Code is forked or copied and then adapted to new requirements. A coarser form of this is cut-and-paste programming.
This is also code reuse but it's not favoured because duplicating code this way makes it less maintainable. During the late s, ad hoc or unplanned reuse was not favoured. It was thought that "reuse should be considered at design time, not after the implementation has been completed".
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