## Overview

Compatibility Analyser compares a set of files in two different versions of Symbian releases against a predefined Binary Compatibility (BC) criteria, and reports any changes that affect BC. The analysis is done on header files or import libraries of the platform source code. Preserving BC is central in Symbian development to ensure that any executable that was built against an older version can be run without changes on a newer version of the platform.

The comparison is made between a baseline version of a Symbian release and a newer version of the release, that needs to be verified. Changes such as adding new code, or modifying or deleting existing code can break the compatibility. See the following figure for an overview of the process:

Compatibility reports can be filtered so that they compare the found issues against set of issues, listed in a knownissues.xml file. This file contains information on whether or not the same BC problems have occurred before in the Symbian platform and what should be done about them. If the knownissues.xml file does not return any information, the BC issue is new and introduced by the product.

##### Related concepts

- Overview to Binary Compatibility
- Software Development Kit (SDK)