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Characteristics of the Platform Based Software Engineering

Tuomas Mäkilä, Antero Järvi, Characteristics of the Platform Based Software Engineering. In: Proceedings of New Exploratory Technologies 2008, Turku Centre for Computer Science, 2008.

Abstract:

Software platforms (e.g. Force.com, Google Maps API, and Facebook API) are gaining popularity especially in the web development. Software platform is a combination of software libraries and tools targeting to a specific domain (e.g. business applications, map applications, social networks). The main purpose of a development platform is to raise the abstraction level of software design and implementation. This allows the application developers to omit the technical implementation details and focus on solving the application level challenges instead. Besides making development more efficient in certain domains, the software platforms have enabled completely new business models.

The academic research has focused on the technical implementation and the architectures of these platforms. However, the changes in the development work caused by the platforms have not been fully investigated. Main goal of the software platforms is to make software development more efficient in certain domains. It is still uncertain if the domain-specific tools and the programming interfaces are the only cause for the increased efficiency, or do the software platforms also enforce the developers to change the techniques used during the development work. It is possible that the platform based software engineering would require especially tailored development methodologies.

In this paper we analyze the key characteristics of software platforms from the development point of view by going through the common software development phases from the requirements elicitation to the software release and maintenance, and discussing how the development work in these phases is affected when a software platform is used. We focus on the essential development tasks and omit the analysis of the best development process or method for platform based development.

BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpMaJa08a,
  title = {Characteristics of the Platform Based Software Engineering},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of New Exploratory Technologies 2008},
  author = {Mäkilä, Tuomas and Järvi, Antero},
  publisher = {Turku Centre for Computer Science},
  year = {2008},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Other

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