dealing with reuse. In detail the steps followed are the following. This paper presents the initial results of the Surprise project. Surprise is an EspritIEssi project. aimed at identifying key factors in adopting or running a company wide reuse program. Key factors are derived from empirical evidence of best reuse practices, as emerged from an extensive survey of recent European reuse projects: more than 20 reuse projects performed in Europe from 1994 to I997 were annlysed.