You want to build reusable assets in an agile manner – avoiding a significant design effort upfront and evolving behavior over time. Why? Because building for reuse involves several steps: the right abstractions have to be identified, appropriate variations have to be modeled and accounted for, and the asset has to be generic enough for use beyond a single project.
This is hard to get right the first time – often, business requirements aren’t clear from the early on making it tricky to identify reusable assets. More importantly, reuse adds project risk – specifically risk to the timeline. Always ask yourself if it is worth making the extra investment – if you aren’t sure delay commitment.
Capture possible enhancements to your codebase via an issue tracking tool and you can always assign those enhancements to future iterations. When you implement a story and you see the opportunity for making something reusable, consciously align classes and interfaces for reuse. Refactor, refactor, and keep refactoring – because only with multiple iterations is your asset going to be increase it’s reuse potential. Remember – very often, the asset would not be used as-is. It will need changes – patches, enhancements, major redesign even – before it can be leveraged across projects.
