search-first

Researching existing libraries involves searching package repositories, code templates, and knowledge bases to identify reusable solutions before implementation. This structured workflow ensures you evaluate existing tools against your feature requirements to avoid reinventing the wheel.

A pre-implementation research workflow is a systematic process to search for and evaluate existing tools before coding. It defines specific steps to identify existing libraries and patterns, ensuring teams leverage available solutions instead of building from scratch.

To decide whether to adopt, extend, or build a tool, apply a structured decision matrix that evaluates existing solutions against your requirements. This evaluation criteria guides your decision path to select the most efficient approach for your feature development.

You should search for existing solutions whenever starting a feature, adding a dependency, or selecting a tool. Determining if an existing library already covers your needs prevents unnecessary development and promotes code reuse across your project.

The best way to evaluate existing tools for code reuse is applying a defined decision matrix that assesses whether to adopt, extend, or build. This structured evaluation ensures the selected tool meets your feature requirements and integration needs.