Portability

Portability is a quality attribute describing the degree of effectiveness and efficiency with which a system, product, or component can be transferred from one hardware, software, or other operational or usage environment to another.

Per ISO/IEC 25010, portability is composed of three sub-characteristics: adaptability, the degree to which a product can be adapted for different or evolving environments; installability, the ease with which it can be successfully installed or uninstalled in a given environment; and replaceability, the degree to which it can substitute for another product intended for the same purpose in the same environment.

A system’s portability is largely determined by how tightly it depends on the specifics of its current environment – a particular operating system, hardware architecture, or vendor-specific API – rather than on standardized interfaces that many environments support.