Case Study of Evaluating Porting Costs: Porting IxOS on ARM Boards

The software porting process is costly and time consuming. Software reuse has become a standard practice in software engineering due to its cost saving benefits, therefore it is important to understand the framework for quantifying the costs of reuse so that the process can be optimized. In order to explore this issue, we take our experience of porting the Ixia network testing infrastructure on a popular, off-the-shelf system that supports Linux, such as Raspberry Pi and extract the porting costs associated with this process. This leads us to a revised model of porting based on which we extract the costs for our project. Furthermore we present the factors that affect the porting and their direct correspondence with the porting model and costs. We discover that the porting process is not linearly dependent on the degree of portability of the system, it very much depends on the familiarity of the developer with the system. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our porting model and make a comparison with the old porting model.

Files and directories

• scss/ - sources for the paper presented in UPB SCSS Conference
• src/ - source for the Bacherlor's Thesis
• The files in the root directory are notes taken during the months of preparing the final version of the thesis.