Internal marketplace as a mechanism for promoting software reuse

Reuse is one of the classic ways to improve productivity in software development. Indeed, benefiting from software components, patterns, and solutions that have been developed in the company potentially leads to savings in all phases of software intensive work. However, putting such an approach to practice is far from being simple. In particular, when considering software companies that specialize in customer-specific software projects, it is common that similar designs and technology choices are made in parallel without project-crossing knowledge. In such settings, there is a lack of a systematic approach between projects to spread good practices or to eliminate bad ones. In this paper, we propose solving such problems with an information system that acts as a marketplace for promoting software reuse within a project organization, much to the same flavor as app stores are used to promote mobile applications. The paper provides insight to the design of our prototype system, as well as contains preliminary views from users in one organization.