Towards Maintainable Platform Software -- Delivery Cost Control in Continuous Software Development

Abstract

Modern platform software delivery cost increases rapidly as it usually needs to align with many hardware and silicon's TTMs, feature evolvement and involves hundreds of engineers. In this paper, citing one ultra-large-scale software - Intel Media Driver as an example, we analyze the hotspots leading to delivery cost increase in continuous software development, the challenges on our software design and our experiences on software delivery cost shrink against the targeted design enhancements. We expect the identified hotspots can help more researchers to form the corresponding research agendas and the experiences shared can help following practitioners to apply similar enhancements.