Good and evil of software platforms

March 15, 2006 by Artem

Software platforms by definition are

“some sort of framework, either in hardware or software, which allows software to run. Typical platforms include a computer's architecture, operating system, or programming languages and their runtime libraries.”

Business requirements driven platforms

Lately I've heard an opinion of one manager that the platform features should be driven by the business requirements and then these features will enable the concrete products. As an agile methods supporter I immediately became suspicious: anything that does not directly add value is over-design and are very likely to be useless and harmful.

The danger is in the fact that the business requirements discovered by some business analysts might simply hang in the air without the real link to the implementation, while various project will struggle trying to do the concrete things what their concrete customers want. The horizontal platform can easily become unbalanced, with too much effort put into never used features while some other components are not flexible enough.
Project driven platforms

As Joel Spolsky correctly notes:

“It's really, really important to figure out if your product is a platform or not, because platforms need to be marketed in a very different way to be successful. That's because a platform needs to appeal to developers first and foremost, not end users.”

The crucial mistake of business requirements driven approach is the assumption that these are the end-users who are the target audience. They are not. The platform customers are the developers and concrete projects.

Good and evil

So are the horizontal platforms evil? Not really. System libraries are useful, encourage the code reuse and save the developers from the unneeded low-level details. The only thing the platform designers should pay big attention to is who the actual platform customer is and how exactly the platform helps them. Platform driven by the [generalized] project requirements greatly facilitates the application development and exactly at the points where help is needed.

What is your experience with the platforms? What of the platforms you used was the most useful and why?

Permalink