Overview

The Problem: Complexity of software product line portfolio development inhibits business-critical goals

Customer demands require most companies to offer a product line – a portfolio of closely related products with variations in features and functions – rather than just a single product. For development organizations that create standalone or embedded software for a product line portfolio, the ensuing complexity poses significant strategic and tactical challenges.

These development organizations must create, evolve and maintain intertwined software combinations and feature variations, dispersed across a multitude of products and on different production schedules. Managing this multiplicity and interdependency – across the entire software portfolio development lifecycle – is an exponentially complex and costly development problem.

Most importantly, these tactical development challenges are large enough to inhibit a company's ability to hit strategic market windows, provide competitive pricing, maximize product quality, and expand the scale and scope of their portfolio.

The Solution: Engineer your portfolio as though it is a single system

Emerging software product line development tools, methods and techniques dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of portfolio development. BigLever Software Gears, one of the industry's most innovative and proven software product line development tools, allows development organizations to fully leverage these breakthrough benefits by engineering their software product line portfolio as though it is a single system rather than a multitude of products.

Gears enables non-disruptive, incremental transitions to software product line practice, delivering rapid return on investment. The BigLever solution is ideally designed for “bottom-up" transitions, where organizations reuse existing software assets – such as requirements, architecture, source code and test cases – rather than re-engineering their software product lines.

With Gears, development organizations can achieve order-of-magnitude improvements in time-to-market, cost, quality, and portfolio scalability – improvements so large they impact the fundamentals of how companies compete.