Free White Paper Details Systems and Software Product Line Engineering

Software-based product development companies today are developing product portfolios instead of individual products and as a result, face complex challenges in creating and maintaining the embedded software needed to support a rapidly expanding product line portfolio.

To help with this, a new approach called Software product lines, “SPL,” is enabling companies to develop, deliver and evolve an entire product line portfolio. Additionally, it’s believed that the integration of model-driven development“MDD” and SPL technologies can enable companies to effectively deal with software product line diversity across the entire portfolio development lifecycle.

With SPL engineering, companies gain the ability to efficiently create, maintain and evolve a portfolio of similar products with the simplicity of a single system rather than the complexity of deploying a multitude of products.

IBM (News - Alert) Rational and BigLever Software have teamed up to provide an “innovative” and “pragmatic” new SPL solution.

Officials with IBM note that this new solution provides companies the infrastructure, tools, best practices and methods required to create an advanced and efficient means of production for their software-based product lines.

In addition, company officials said the motivation for integration of Rational Rhapsody with BigLever Gears via the Rational Rhapsody/Gears Bridge is to capitalize on a strong synergy, which results by combining MDD and SPL engineering. MDD leverages abstraction provided by the unified modeling language and the systems modeling language to accelerate system and software development.

With MDD, creating software for a portfolio of similar products has traditionally relied on one of two different approaches, clone-and-own or one-size-fits-all.

A free white paper “Systems and Software Product Line Engineering with SysML, UML and the IBM Rational Rhapsody BigLever Gears Bridge” describes SPL and MDD technologies in detail and provides background on SPLs and BigLever Software Gears as well as background on MDD and Rational Rhapsody.

For more, check out the white paper HERE.

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