Software engineers appear to reinvent the wheel hundreds of times during a career. For the past fifteen or so years, researchers have been trying to discern the reasons why software engineers rarely reuse software components that have been previously created. A few companies and government agencies have made major investments in reuse, e.g., in the creation of reusable component libraries.The purpose of this paper is to report our observations of six specific reuse projects in five different organizations. In particular, our goal is to uncover common attributes that make reuse successful.