BigLever Software Related Technology
The emerging field of systems and software product line engineering (PLE) brings innovative methodologies, tools and techniques, as well as new perspectives, to engineering organizations across a broad spectrum of industries. This section provides insight into how PLE relates to other development technologies and approaches.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
The relative strengths of PLM, ALM and PLE converge in near-perfect jigsaw puzzle fashion. PLM's limited support for managing systems and software can be overcome by ALM tools. ALM's limited support for managing variation across a product line portfolio can be overcome by PLE tools. The result is a powerful solution for managing the engineering lifecycle of systems and software intensive mechanical product line portfolios.
Configuration Management
Configuration management for a systems and software product line is a multi-dimensional problem. In addition to the conventional problem of managing the evolution of systems and software over time, product lines introduce the additional problem of managing variation among the different products within the application domain space of the product line.
Model Driven Development
The integration of model-driven development and product line engineering technologies is essential for companies to simultaneously leverage the benefits of both practices. In response to mounting market demand, these two synergistic technologies have converged to create a simple, elegant integrated solution that enables organizations to incorporate the management of product line diversity into model-driven development.
Software Reuse
The characteristic that distinguishes systems and software product line engineering from the 'common' reuse efforts is predictive versus opportunistic software reuse. Rather than put general systems and software components into a library in hopes that opportunities will arise for reuse, product line engineering only call for soft artifacts to be created when reuse is predicted in one or more products in a well-defined product line.