Model Driven Development and Software Product Lines

In recent years, model-driven development (MDD) has received much attention due to the significant productivity gains it delivers over traditional development approaches. By enabling developers to use software models to raise the level of programming abstraction, MDD allows organizations to create applications with less effort and accelerate the product development process.

While MDD technologies provide a powerful enabler for the rapid development of individual products within a product line, companies face complex challenges in managing product diversity across a product line portfolio.

In tandem with MDD’s growing popularity, software product line (SPL) engineering has rapidly gained acceptance in the mainstream development community as a first-class engineering practice for product line portfolio development. However, as emerging SPL technologies have evolved, MDD has remained an under-served part of the SPL portfolio development lifecycle. Thus, the integration of MDD and SPL technologies is essential for companies to simultaneously leverage the benefits of both practices.

The Convergence of MDD and SPL Technologies

In response to mounting market demand, industry leaders IBM Rational and BigLever Software have led the convergence of these synergistic technologies by creating a simple, elegant integrated solution that enables organizations to incorporate the management of product line diversity into model-driven development.

With this technology integration, development organizations will achieve a new level of productivity and heightened efficiency from utilizing: 1) MDD models, rather than working with traditional source code, and 2) SPL consolidation and automated production capabilities, rather than creating cloned copies of MDD models for each product or building “one-size-fits-all” software for all products. These unified capabilities enable companies to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in development productivity, portfolio scalability and time-to-market.

Learn more about the MDD/SPL integration in the Rhapsody/Gears Bridge – see data sheet, webinar and white paper.