Refactoring reusable business components

Object evangelists have long heralded software reuse as a bonus for applying object-oriented analysis, design, and programming techniques, but the benefits have been less dramatic than anticipated. Designing reusable software systems is difficult because a complete understanding of the software under consideration is only available toward the project´s end. An appropriate alternative, then, is to refactor for reuse, restructure the completed system without modifying or adding to its behavior. We describe a refactoring effort undertaken at a Delaware-Valley-based financial firm. This firm sought to reuse components from a large Web-based system.