Abstract Issues in the Specification and Measurement of Software Portability

Portability is becoming universally recognized as a desirable attribute for most software products, and porting is a recognized technique for extending the value and life of a software unit. However, most porting is still done by ad hoc techniques. Portability is not addressed explicitly either by software engineering curricula or by common software development methodologies. Moreover, there are few reports in the literature of academic research focused on portability issues. Many studies deal with reuse issues, and porting is a special case of reuse. However, these studies have not addressed the specialized problems of reuse across substantially different operating environments. A portability research group has been established at West Virginia University to help meet this need. Our overall goal is to develop improved methodologies for addressing portability in a cost-effective way for a wide range of software. A major obstacle to meeting this goal is the lack of established mechanisms to specify and measure portability. In this presentation we propose some initial approaches to the development of such mechanisms. We first describe briefly the issues that arise in developing portable software, and in reimplementing or porting existing software. This analysis is used to identify specification types and metrics that may aid in makin