ABSTRACT
The term “configuration” may be used in slightly dierent ways with respect to soware. In some cases, it may refer to options that are settable through an external le or other source. For example, a database management system may have congurable options for storage location and size, maximum size of various tables, key length, and other aspects of databases. ese congurable options are read in when the system is initialized and used to set properties of the application. In other cases, conguration refers to characteristics of the platform on which the application is running, such as the presence or absence of a hard keyboard on a smart phone, the network protocol used, or the type of database. In this case, the congurable options are expected to essentially provide the same functions to the soware-network interface or searchable storage-but low-level functions in the application must interface dierently depending on the protocol or the database in use. e soware is built to operate correctly on a variety of platforms, and dierent parts of the code may be exercised depending on the conguration.
