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

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the factors increasing delivery costs in large-scale platform software development, using Intel Media Driver as a case study, and shares strategies to reduce costs through design improvements.

Contribution

It identifies key hotspots that lead to increased delivery costs and shares practical experiences on cost reduction in continuous software development.

Findings

Hotspots contributing to delivery cost increase identified

Design enhancements can effectively reduce delivery costs

Practical experiences shared for industry application

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.