This technical case study by Faisal Dosani, Royal Bank of Canada; Lisa Eckler, Lisa Eckler Consulting Inc.; and Marje Fecht, Prowerk Consulting Ltd.,  discusses the steps to develop a hands-off process for creating flexible and extensible solutions that avoid maintainability issues and enable speed to market of results.

Building reusable and extensible code requires planning and discipline, but the benefits outweigh the efforts. Once the framework is in place and metadata is available for a project, results can be delivered rapidly with little effort. By defining and utilizing minimally acceptable inputs and results - even if a component isn't available - the other components can be delivered to provide immediate value. Code modularization not only helps reusability but chunks the logic into digestible pieces. Documenting and sharing knowledge about short, focused modules is far easier than doing it for thousands of lines of code in one chunk.

Read Four steps to developing reusable code and production processes.