Solution

BigLever Software Gears is the industry-leading software product line engineering tool and framework that enables you to develop and evolve your product line portfolio, smoothly and efficiently, through each lifecycle stage – from requirements to design, development and testing.

The Gears Software Production Line
Gears is used to create a software production line capable of producing all of the products in a software product line portfolio. A Gears software production line comprises three key elements:

Software Assets are configurable software artifacts – such as source code, requirements, and test cases – engineered to be reused across the product line.

Product Feature Profiles model each product in the portfolio in terms of optional and varying feature choices specified for the product line.

The Gears Configurator automatically assembles and configures the software assets, guided by the product feature profiles, to produce the products in the portfolio.

Consolidate, Simplify, Leverage: Engineer Your Portfolio as a Single System
Manufacturers have long employed analogous engineering techniques to produce a product line portfolio, using a single factory that assembles and configures parts designed to be reused across the product line. For example, automotive manufacturers create many unique variations of a car model using a single pool of carefully architected parts and a production facility specifically designed to configure and assemble those parts.

The powerful, though subtle, essence of this approach – for software and for manufacturing – is the focus on the single system rather than the many products. Once the production line is established, products are automatically instantiated rather than manually created. Organizations are able to leverage the order of magnitude improvements in time-to-market, development cost, portfolio scalability and product quality for overwhelming strategic business advantage.