Reinventing the wheel?

Anecdote posted a blog about questions to ask to avoid needlessly reinventing the wheel and while there is nothing wrong with that there is usually another side to every story - and here's mine.

The issue is over the definition of "wheel" and a search may discover that we have done something like a wheel before but that one was white and now we need a red one. The inexact art is deciding whether it is easier to build the red wheel reusing the techniques used for the white one or to build it from scratch.

I've seen may attempts to reuse ideas, particularly software code, fail because the differences between the two cases proved to be greater than first thought once the project got under way.

Sometimes reinventing the wheel is the right thing to do.