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Brief BioAl Davis is professor of information systems at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He was a member of the board of directors of Requisite, Inc., acquired by Rational Software Corporation in February 1997, and subsequently acquired by IBM in 2003. He has consulted for many corporations over the past twenty-seven years,

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.

Marketing experts emphasize that the creation of superior customer value is a key element for companies' success. Understanding how to create value for customers, however, is not trivial in practice. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of requirements engineering (RE) in customer value creation. The paper describes experiences gained from six Finnish companies that develop software-intensive products and services for global markets. In practice, the focus of RE activities is mainly on product features. Customer value creation is, however, more than developing a competitive set of product features. It is important for companies to understand customers' processes and develop solutions that support these processes. To enable practitioners to change the focus from feature development to customer value creation, we propose a set of RE practices.