NAV has a lot of software. Around 143 000 000 lines of code, and steadily increasing as we keep modernising and improving our digital services. Maintaining this huge code base is expensive and time-consuming. To reduce maintenance cost, we should produce less code, not more. One way would be to reuse more code and establish common components for teams to use. The talk will give a brief description of what NAV is, and why reuse (sometimes) is good for us.

We will go through different kinds of reuse such as open source, fork based reuse, shared libraries, common services and platforms. We will also discuss reusing knowledge and people, the pros and cons of the different approaches as well as a few lessons learned.

We have learned that the existing NAV mantra known as “reuse should be discovered, not designed” doesn't really work for us. We have to find a different approach, guided by product thinking and Conways law. To enable reusable components, you need an organisation to own these. We also need to re-arrange our incentives, financing and organisation to enable reuse in line with a product mindset.