Approaches to making software porting more productive

Reuse of software modules is seen as one way of raising software productivity, and an effective way of realizing software reuse is to port relatively large modules across different machines or different operating systems. This paper considers ways of raising the productivity of software porting, from the two approaches of making programs more portable and of improving the efficiency of the porting work. The first approach involves eliminating potential porting problems at the program development stage and localizing places that might need revision, thereby minimizing the scale of changes necessary in porting and raising the productivity of program porting. The second approach to making porting more productive is to compile the know-how relating to porting work and provide tools to support that work. The effectiveness of the measures proposed above is tested based on data collected from porting CTRON-specification Extended OS programs