Explicit Management of Platform Variability
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Introduction
Software-intensive systems are seldomly built from scratch nowadays. In most cases, such systems are based on existing platforms. A platform can be described as the combination of (visible) underlying hardware and software, on top of which the envisioned software-intensive system will be built. This definition fits within the vision of software families, or Software Product Lines (SPL), in which a product line of software-intensive systems is based on the same central platform. Pohl et al. describe a platform as follows:
The moment a developer of software-intensive systems chooses for an underlying platform, a dependency on that platform starts growing. This dependency has a primarily technical foundation, because the developed software simply invokes the services of the platform. As the software evolves, more services of the platform are typically being used. This makes it increasingly difficult to switch to another underlying platform. This essentially technical problem is partly the cause of the economic problem of vendor lock-in.
A web portal has been set up to deal with the problem of Platform Variability in detail:
