S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance: A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers

Chapter 2: Selecting the Baseline

The software industry has had to adapt to a very new mindset since the early 1990s. Software began to play a key role in very many products after consumers had started to appreciate the ever-growing number of new features in these products. As a result of the new features and technologies, the average size of the software in a mobile phone has grown quite a lot. This increase is not only due to the new complex functionality (often described as ‘digital convergence’) required in these new products, but also because of the need to put more structure and discipline into the software system in order to make it more controllable. Well-known features such as modularity, scalability and decoupling form part of this. Engineers are also facing challenges in introducing an operating system on the signal-processor side, in order to be able to meet new demands.

2.1 Manny Lehman's Law

As a program evolves, its structure will become more complex. Just as in physics, this effect can, through great cost, be negated in the short term.

Michael W. Godfrey and Qiang Tu based their case study on the evolution of open-source software on Manny Lehman's law:

When a software system gets bigger, its resulting complexity tends to limit its ability to grow. As an advice to this; the complexity needs to be well managed and maybe even the entire system needs to be redesigned every now and then.

MSW releases the S60 platform at a very early stage in the development of a platform ...