Quality Improvement in Software Platform Development

A major problem when using software platforms to produce a variety of products relates to keeping a high quality of the platform throughout the development of the products. For a software platform development to be successful, it is essential to master the quality issues when managing and designing the platform. This thesis presents approaches that enable efficient use of the software platform when it is used as one of the core assets of a product line. Different approaches that are believed to improve the quality of the platform are presented. In order to study the approaches’ effect on the development process it is vital to understand what quality attributes are of importance for the users and developers of the software platform. Several important aspects related to different quality attributes are presented. When using software platforms it is important to understand why the system is designed in a certain way (i.e. the design rationale of the platform). This knowledge can be used to improve the change impact analysis when building variations of products and when updating the platform itself. Management processes are needed to support development efforts in different phases of platform projects and across the products built on the platform. A way to find improvements is to benchmark the platform process used in the organisation with practices in similar organisations. Another way is to understand how the processes affect the quality by measuring and tracking different quality attributes. The results from this thesis provide support for quality improvements in software platform development by using the presented approaches.