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BigLever Software Introduces Gears 5.2(TM) to Streamline Early Stages of Portfolio Lifecycle Management; Gears 5.2 Enables the Integration of Requirements Management With Software Product Line Development to Reduce Time-to-Market and Production Costs

Posted on: Monday, 19 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

BigLever Software(TM), a leading provider of software product line development tools and services, today announced the release of Gears 5.2(TM), delivering new capabilities for streamlining key early stages of portfolio lifecycle management. With this new product version organizations can integrate requirements management with the innovative feature modeling and selection capabilities delivered by software product line development approaches. The efficient integration of these technologies simplifies the portfolio development lifecycle and significantly reduces time-to-market and production costs.

Managing requirements across the product line becomes increasingly complex and time-consuming as companies introduce diverse capabilities and feature sets into their growing portfolios. Today, Gears 5.2 integrates existing requirements management tools with software product line development capabilities, therefore providing organizations the ability to create and manage requirements across the entire product line portfolio. As a result, improved collaboration and more efficient communication between product management and engineering/development teams are attained.

"Complexity is increasing with regards to requirements for product life cycle management, as well as for the software development life cycle," said Melinda Ballou, Program Director for Application Life Cycle Management at IDC. "Foggy and mismanaged requirements inevitably lead to project irrelevance or failure, at the best of times. Better coordination and collaboration is enabled through access to core business needs to drive increasingly complicated, global product and software development projects."

"Gears 5.2 was created in response to increased customer demand for integrating requirements management tools with software product line development approaches," said Charles Krueger, chief executive officer of BigLever Software. "Gears 5.2 reflects the first step in addressing the convergence of software product lines (SPL) for software portfolio development, application lifecycle management (ALM) for the development lifecycle of individual software products, and product lifecycle management (PLM) for the development lifecycle of mechanical CAD product portfolios."

About Gears 5.2

Gears is a software product line development tool designed to simplify and accelerate the development of software for a portfolio of similar products with variations in features and functions. Software development organizations can augment their existing development tool set with Gears in order to develop their product portfolio as though it were a single system -- rather than a multitude of products. Gears can be used in any or all stages of the portfolio development lifecycle, for more effective requirements management, change and configuration management, source code development, software builds, testing, and document development.

Gears 5.2 delivers the following new capabilities and enhancements:

Enhanced integration

-- Enables existing requirements management tools -- such as Telelogic DOORS, UGS TeamCenter, and Rational RequisitePro -- to be used in conjunction with Gears in a software product line development setting to create and maintain the requirements for the product line portfolio.

-- Allows the filtering and viewing capabilities of requirements management tools to integrate with the feature selection capabilities of Gears to automatically select optional requirements based on feature choices for a product within a product line portfolio.

-- Eliminates the need to create and maintain separate requirements documentation for each product in a product line.

Simplified feature modeling

-- Allows developers to more effectively understand and manage large, complex feature models for their product lines.

-- Provides a clear view into a hierarchy of features by displaying features in a "nested and indented layout" which reflects parent/child relationships between features.

Improved subsystem viewing and navigation

-- For software product lines composed of nested subsystems, allows developers to more easily view and comprehend the overall system structure, as well as navigate more readily among the subsystems.

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 portfolio. BigLever's patent-pending solution, Gears, 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 www.biglever.com.

Copyright (C) 2006 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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