Portatiivsuse

Portatiivsuse is the property of portability—the degree to which software, data, or systems can be transferred and used in different computing environments with minimal modification. In practice, portatiivsuse refers to cross-platform compatibility, cross-architecture portability, and cross-language portability, depending on the domain.

In software engineering, improving portatiivsuse involves designing with platform-neutral interfaces, relying on standard libraries and APIs, avoiding vendor- or platform-specific features, and using portable data formats such as JSON, XML, or CSV. Dependencies are managed with portable packaging and environments (for example, containers like Docker, or virtual environments) to reproduce runtimes reliably. Build scripts, configuration, and documentation are kept portable across operating systems.

Measurement of portatiivsuse includes the success rate of builds and tests when run on target platforms, time to port, and runtime consistency across environments. Teams often employ automated cross-platform testing, continuous integration pipelines that build for multiple targets, and explicit portability goals in project governance.

Etymology: the term derives from Latin portativus "portable" and is used in Estonian technical vocabulary to denote this idea. While mostly applied in computing, the concept can appear in other fields to describe transferability, adaptability, or ease of migration between contexts. Related terms include portability, cross-platform development, and environment-agnostic design.