Arduino DC motor with 2 buttons
In your code the buttons only control the direction, but are not turning the motor on or off. This is only be done with the potentiometer, which can be set to zero speed.

To really enable the motor with the buttons, you have add some logic for the enable pin. For example change the setMotor() function and give it also a boolean as parameter, which indicates the enabling of the motor:

void setMotor(int speed, boolean enabled, boolean reverse)
{
    if(enabled) analogWrite(enablePin, speed);
    else        analogWrite(enablePin, 0);
    digitalWrite(in1Pin, ! reverse);
    digitalWrite(in2Pin, reverse);
}


You can set a corresponding boolean variable in the loop() function like you did with the status variable. Set this new variable to true in both if-statement of the buttons. Alternatively you can do this inline with the setMotor() call by writing:

setMotor(speed, reverse || reverse1, status);


The || is a logical OR operation. It returns true if any of both operands are true. In a similar way you can ditch the other if-statement with the status variable:

setMotor(speed, reverse || reverse1, !reverse &amp;&amp; reverse1);


! negates the value of reverse and &amp;&amp; does a logical AND. You can decide yourself, if you want to use if-statements (which are a bit easier to read or these logical statements (which are more compact).



Also you should use better variable names. reverse and reverse1 are not really good to distinguish. Better would be reverse and forward.