this program has known compatibility issues

Put a plan in place to ensure backward compatibility before any development work begins.

'This business-critical software will also be around for a long, long time,' Lanowitz said, so it can't be ignored. The plan should account for how an application interacts with business-critical software. To address software compatibility challenges, enforce an effective testing strategy. The modeling engine keeps track of customization, which helps Aras' software compatibility testing efforts, said Mark Reisig, the company's director of product marketing. As part of its offering, Aras upgrades its customers' software upon request, including all user or third-party customizations. To take all possible setups into account, Aras, an end-to-end industrial digital platform software provider, created a modeling engine that sits behind an API in its service delivery layer. No two users' systems are alike each one has customizations and configuration variations. Each platform version has an API version specified to work with it, which ensures that new versions of the API won't break users' existing software. WhiteSource now uses API versioning to reduce software compatibility issues. 'You can always add new features, but it's really hard to change what you already have.'

'If you make a bad decision in the past, it can be hard to correct moving forward,' said David Habusha, VP of product at WhiteSource. To make the keys compatible with the older software versions, WhiteSource had to create a whole new set of APIs. The company added a user keys feature to its platform to control access for APIs and other tools but quickly realized that it wasn't compatible with older, still popular versions of the product. WhiteSource, an open source security platform, discovered this the hard way. Software must maintain compatibility with everything it relies on to work: various versions of ERP systems, databases, class libraries, development tools and APIs. Incompatibilities that involve legacy enterprise software and customizations can be more difficult to detect and rectify than ones that affect browsers, connectors and OSes. Not all software compatibility issues carry the same severity, said Theresa Lanowitz, lead analyst at Voke Inc. While software compatibility testing - and backward compatibility testing, in particular - might seem antithetical to a development culture oriented toward quickly shipping new features, fast releases and quality don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Review the software architecture to identify potential problems before users see them. To avoid software compatibility issues, teams must develop a solid architectural plan, prepare thorough release notes and perform customer outreach.

This program has known compatibility issues