The goals of your development team is centralized around producing a feature-rich, secure, scalable, robust suite of software that can be sold out of the box to customers.

In order to accomplish that task development teams need to restructure how they look at projects. I’m proposing a new term called Code Longevity. Code Longevity means thinking about software development in terms of fluidness; how easy is the source code to change, adapt, and be repaired over time. Code Longevity requires code modularity, code documentation, standardization of code styles, and a flexible architecture. Successful software is not static, it is a living entity that grows and evolves through time

The software management team must anticipate the future applications of the product and realizing that building generic interfaces will allow the software to adapt to unknown directions the software may evolve. No software evolution cycles can be perfectly predicted due to outside variables therefore the software must be designed in the general case even though it may take more time to initially develop. After the time has been taken to create the general case of the software then the evolutionary line can make sharper, more agile changes in direction as there is minimal development necessary.

By modularizing our approach to software and creating a core asset collection of core components we are in a sense productizing our software source code. The core assets now act as component products, where developers can create extremely advanced application software without knowledge of the inner workings of the core assets. A developer can think about implementation and logic flow for their particular development goal rather than have to think about building the supporting tools (APIs and software libraries) that will make the goal feasible.