BigLever Software Gears

Gears is a software product line engineering tool and framework that addresses the unique challenges of engineering software for a portfolio of similar products, across the full development lifecycle. Gears shifts the development focus from a multitude of products to a single Software Production Line capable of automatically producing all of the products in a portfolio. The key elements of the Gears framework are:

Feature Models and Product Feature Profiles
The Gears feature model language allows software architects to model – at the domain level – the optional and varying features that differentiate the products in a portfolio. A product feature profile is created for each product in a portfolio, uniquely characterizing each product by specifying the desired feature choices in the feature model.

Configurable Software Assets and Variation Points
Gears variation points – used in software assets such as requirements, source code and test cases – allow developers to create intelligent encapsulations for implementation-level differences among the products in a portfolio. Gears provides a language for programming each variation point with the intelligence to configure itself based on a product feature profile.

Product Configurator
Gears provides a product configurator that engineers use to automatically produce the individual products in a portfolio. Given a feature profile, the configurator composes the necessary assets and configures the variation points within those assets to produce a product matching the feature profile.

Gears Development Environment
The Gears development environment provides a unique “console” for the portfolio-specific facets of software development. With its powerful collection of browsers, views, languages, constraints, editors, dashboards, wizards and analytical tools, Gears dramatically simplifies the entire portfolio development lifecycle for software product lines. The Gears development environment integrates easily with legacy and new software, and with existing development tools and organizations.

One consolidated collection of software assets. One consolidated mechanism for portfolio variation. One consolidated system for producing all products in a portfolio. Gears is a simple and elegant engineering solution. See a Gears Demo to learn more.