Clearly, not all IP is created equal. The actual process of successfully evaluating and integrating the IP to maximize the benefits of reuse is as important as the decision to reuse. In most cases, the IP selected can directly affect the success or failure of the end product.

As anyone who has looked for IP has discovered, however, there are many IP suppliers, and more enter the fray daily. Simplistically, functionality needs to be the first selection criterion, but when two or more similar pieces of IP are available, the criteria can multiply.

In the past, IP selection may have been based solely on the purchase price. With the rising costs of respins, however, the risks associated with integrating IP using this decision-making process far outweigh any cost savings from the purchase price. There are other approaches for evaluating IP, but they have met with varying degrees of success.

The most common method used to evaluate third-party IP has been pure internal review. This is resource-intensive, often requiring man-months of internal effort. More often than not, legal counsel must be included to generate or evaluate nondisclosure agreements, adding to the total evaluation time.

Another method used in the past was the OpenMore spreadsheet, based on the Reuse Methodology Manual. While that method was publicly available and a first step for measuring and communicating IP quality, actual usage showed that much of the metric was open to interpretation, so it had limited success.

Finally, some companies have developed internal reuse standards and attempt to get their vendors to deliver IP that conforms to them. But such standards tend to be company-specific and to address a much broader space than could reasonably be expected for third-party compliance. The standards truly are geared to enabling internal reuse. They typically are more complex than is necessary, and they tend to obscure, through sheer volume, the important reuse measures.

Relying on the above approaches to IP selection has resulted in great variations in the actual experience of using the IP, depending on the provider, the end-application consumer and even the individual integrator. None of the methods provides a consistent mechanism to communicate an IP's suitability to purpose between vendors and end customers.

The VSI Alliance's Quality IP (QIP) metric addresses that lack. Its premise is that good designs are a product of good design practices, from IP conception all the way through customer delivery and support. Integrators can use the QIP metric to evaluate similar IP from multiple vendors via an apples-to-apples comparison. QIP is also used by providers as a simple quality control checklist of implementation details and deliverables that lets them objectively evaluate their product quality and refine their designs and methods for successful reuse. Application of the metric facilitates feedback between the users and the IP providers, and fosters quality process improvement.