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The article focuses on the author's views regarding benefits of software reuse. While sometimes portrayed as one of the elusive software silver bullets, reuse has also received a fair amount of negative publicity from those who just do not think it will ever work. I have seen benefits of successful software reuse programs and want to take a moment to review the lessons learned from those who have been there. Early work on library methods gave the field a focus and allowed it to grow. More recently, research on reuse practices, organizations, domain analysis techniques and metrics have found a place in the daily routine of large software development organizations. Techniques such as object-orientation and software architectures often rely on software reuse as a unifying goal or objective. For the past 10 years reuse has focused on building libraries. The best libraries range from only 30 components to, in rare cases, as many as 250 components. In general, users find formal classification methods difficult to use. Collecting large amounts of metadata to help retrieve components wastes time, money and makes the library both difficult to contribute to and difficult to retrieve from. We call the problem area that contains these related applications a "domain" and we call the process of identifying the common components and specifying how they fit together "domain analysis." The article discusses methods of domain analysis and the common processes that are involved in these methods.