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BigLever Software's Gears 4.0 Reduces Development Costs and Speeds Time-to-Market for Standalone or Embedded Software Product Lines

Posted on: Tuesday, 26 July 2005, 06:00 CDT

BigLever Software(TM), a leading provider of software product line development tools and services, announced the release of Gears(TM) 4.0, an innovative solution that dramatically simplifies the way development organizations engineer standalone or embedded software for a product line. With Gears, development teams can cut overhead costs and bring new product line features and products to market faster, enabling businesses to more reliably target and hit strategic market windows.

In today's customer-driven environment, most companies target the needs of their prospective customers by creating a product line -- a collection of closely related products with variations in features and functions -- rather than just a single product. For development organizations, creating and maintaining standalone or embedded software for a product line presents a problem. Most development tools and techniques focus on the creation of individual products and do not address the unique challenges of developing multiple products within a software product line.

"Without adequate tools and techniques, developing software for a product line is extremely complex. Developers must create, evolve and maintain intertwined software combinations and feature variations, dispersed across multiple products, on different production schedules, and aimed at moving target markets," said Charles Krueger, BigLever CEO and Founder. "Managing this multiplicity, variation and interdependency creates an exponentially complex and expensive development problem. With Gears 4.0, BigLever is providing a practical, proven software product line development approach for simplifying these complexities and reducing development overhead."

"Not since the advent of high-level programming languages have we seen such across-the-board order-of-magnitude improvements in productivity, time to market, and quality brought about by the advent of software product line practice," said Paul Clements, coauthor of the book Software Product Lines and Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Software Engineering Institute.

While software product line technologies promise tremendous potential gains, real world implementations have been inhibited due to significant upfront adoption barriers, perceived by most development organizations as insurmountable. Now, BigLever is removing these adoption barriers so that development organizations can reap immediate benefits from implementing a software product line practice -- without negatively impacting productivity or product delivery schedules during the transition. Gears allows development organizations to transition to a software product line approach by leveraging their existing software assets -- source code, architecture and processes.

Gears enables software developers to consolidate, simplify and leverage the development of software product lines:

Consolidate core assets: Gears is used throughout a software development organization to create and maintain a single, consolidated collection of core software assets. While some core software assets are common to all products, others are optional or will vary from product to product. Gears variation points encapsulate the optional and varying software in the core software assets.

Simplify and automate production: Gears automates the production of all of the products in a product line. With Gears, every product has a product definition that describes its profile of optional and varying features. Given a product definition, Gears can automatically instantiate the variation points to fully compose and configure all of the software needed for that particular product.

Leverage software development competencies: With the core assets and automated production provided by Gears, organizations can eliminate up to 90% of day-to-day development overhead. For example, developers can correct a bug or add an upgrade in one place in the core assets and automatically regenerate a new version of all products.

Gears is agnostic to programming languages and operating systems, making it easy to use in both new and legacy code bases. It extends rather than replaces capabilities of existing software development tools, making it easy to integrate into established development environments. Based on BigLever's innovative software mass customization methodology, Gears has enabled the shortest transitions to software product line practice and has proven to be the most efficient form of software reuse in the industry.

About Gears 4.0. With the release of Gears 4.0, BigLever introduces intuitive simplifications to its user experience and powerful field-driven extensions to its modeling language:

-- Variation Points: Enhancements to the modeling language to enable higher levels of software reuse in fine-grained variation points with complex feature interactions.

-- User experience: Simplified and unified interfaces for all of the Gears software product line modeling editors.

-- Skill levels: Addition of multiple editor views and styles to allow use by a broader audience of developers with varying skill levels.

About BigLever. BigLever Software, a leading provider of software product line development tools and services, dramatically simplifies the creation, evolution and maintenance of embedded or standalone software for a product line. BigLever's patent-pending solution, Gears(TM), enables software development organizations to reduce development costs and bring new product line features and products to market faster, enabling businesses to more reliably target and hit strategic market windows. BigLever is based in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit http://www.biglever.com.

Copyright (C) 2005 BigLever Software, Inc. All rights reserved. BigLever Software, Gears, and their respective logos are trademarks of BigLever Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other company or product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Source: Business Wire

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