Making the leap to a software platform strategy: Issues and challenges

📝 Abstract

Context: While there are many success stories of achieving high reuse and improved quality using software platforms, there is a need to investigate the issues and challenges organizations face when transitioning to a software platform strategy. Objective: This case study provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges faced when a medium-scale organization decided to adopt software platforms. The study also reveals how new trends in software engineering (i.e. agile methods, distributed development and flat management structures) interplayed with the chosen platform strategy. Method: We used an ethnographic approach to collect data by spending time at a medium-scale company in Scandinavia. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews with representatives of eight different teams, three of which were working on three separate platforms. The collected data was analyzed using Grounded Theory. Results: The findings identify four classes of challenges, namely: business challenges, organizational challenges, technical challenges, and people challenges. The article explains how these findings can be used to help researchers and practitioners identify practical solutions and required tool support. Conclusion: The organization’s decision to adopt a software platform strategy introduced a number of challenges. These challenges need to be understood and addressed in order to reap the benefits of reuse. Researchers need to further investigate issues such as supportive organizational structures for platform development, the role of agile methods in software platforms, tool support for testing and continuous integration in the platform context, and reuse recommendation systems.

💡 Analysis

Context: While there are many success stories of achieving high reuse and improved quality using software platforms, there is a need to investigate the issues and challenges organizations face when transitioning to a software platform strategy. Objective: This case study provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges faced when a medium-scale organization decided to adopt software platforms. The study also reveals how new trends in software engineering (i.e. agile methods, distributed development and flat management structures) interplayed with the chosen platform strategy. Method: We used an ethnographic approach to collect data by spending time at a medium-scale company in Scandinavia. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews with representatives of eight different teams, three of which were working on three separate platforms. The collected data was analyzed using Grounded Theory. Results: The findings identify four classes of challenges, namely: business challenges, organizational challenges, technical challenges, and people challenges. The article explains how these findings can be used to help researchers and practitioners identify practical solutions and required tool support. Conclusion: The organization’s decision to adopt a software platform strategy introduced a number of challenges. These challenges need to be understood and addressed in order to reap the benefits of reuse. Researchers need to further investigate issues such as supportive organizational structures for platform development, the role of agile methods in software platforms, tool support for testing and continuous integration in the platform context, and reuse recommendation systems.

📄 Content

This is the author’s version of the work. The definite version was published in: Ghanam, Y., Maurer, F. and Abrahamsson, P., 2012. Making the leap to a software platform strategy: Issues and challenges. Information and Software Technology, 54(9), pp.968-984. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2012.03.005 . Making the leap to a software platform strategy: Issues and challenges Yaser Ghanam a, Frank Maurer a, Pekka Abrahamsson b a Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 b Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 68, 00014 Helsinki, Finland Abstract Context: While there are many success stories of achieving high reuse and improved quality using soft- ware platforms, there is a need to investigate the issues and challenges organizations face when transitioning to a software platform strategy. Objective: This case study provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges faced when a medium- scale organization decided to adopt software platforms. The study also reveals how new trends in software engineering (i.e. agile methods, distributed development, and flat management structures) interplayed with the chosen platform strategy. Method: We used an ethnographic approach to collect data by spending time at a medium-scale company in Scandinavia. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews with representatives of eight different teams, three of which were working on three separate platforms. The collected data was analyzed using Grounded Theory. Results: The findings identify four classes of challenges, namely: business challenges, organizational challenges, technical challenges, and people challenges. The article explains how these findings can be used to help researchers and practitioners identify practical solutions and required tool support. Conclusion: The organization’s decision to adopt a software platform strategy introduced a number of challenges. These challenges need to be understood and addressed in order to reap the benefits of reuse. Researchers need to further investigate issues such as supportive organizational structures for platform development, the role of agile methods in software platforms, tool support for testing and continuous integration in the platform context, and reuse recommendation systems.

1. Introduction One of the areas that has contributed to the advancement of the software engineering field is software reuse. Simply put, software reuse is the notion of building software products using artifacts that were used in building other software products [50]. This definition has grown in complexity as the research area expanded. What is to be reused has also changed overtime. Initially, code reuse was the main objective. Nowadays, reuse includes other arti- facts such as design documents, use cases, test cases as well as pro- cesses and procedures [44]. Some estimates suggest that 60% of the design of all business applications is reusable [53], and only 15% of software code is unique in a given domain or organization [12]. Many advantages of software reuse have been reported in the lit- erature [19,12,16,25], namely: fast delivery of products as less development and testing is required, reduced development and ⇑ maintenance costs, improved quality of reused artifacts, reduced risks by reusing a previously proved solution, and better project estimates for time and cost. One strategic way to achieve reuse is to adopt a software platform approach. We use the term platform to refer to a set of sub-systems and interfaces that form a common infrastructure from which a set of related products (aka. a product family) can be devel- oped [36]. This involves reusing relevant artifacts in the platform, and then a customization process to produce unique products [25]. The decision to adopt software platforms is a strategic one that is taken at the organizational level [37]. While literature is abun- dant on success stories of adopting a software platform strategy (e.g. [31,49]), there is a need to investigate the issues and chal- lenges that organizations face when making the leap to software platforms. The goal of this study is to provide an understanding of the issues and challenges that may hinder the adoption of platforms as a reuse strategy. To achieve this goal, we studied an organization that underwent a transition to a platform strategy. The study was conducted in light of the following research questions: 5 This is the author’s version of the work. The definite version was published in: Ghanam, Y., Maurer, F. and Abrahamsson, P., 2012. Making the leap to a software platform strategy: Issues and challenges. Information and Software Technology, 54(9), pp.968-984. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2012.03.005 . This is the author’s version of the work. The definite version was published in: Ghanam, Y., Maurer, F. and Abrahamsson, P., 2012. Making the leap to a software platform strategy: Issues and challenges.

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