At IBM®, we understand that our customers in the automotive, electronics, and aerospace industries face mounting challenges and tremendous pressures from a constantly changing marketplace. To remain competitive in a volatile business environment, there is increasing demand to infuse more intelligence into the way companies grow and evolve their product line portfolios.
The software embedded in products -- known as "embedded software" -- is increasingly the focus of product line growth, as well as the delivery of business value and innovation. As a result, many companies across almost all industries are seeking pragmatic, yet innovative approaches for improving the way they create and deliver a product line. Ultimately, their goal is to evolve a set of products that have both commonality and variation built into them, while allowing a high degree of variability between the different products.
For example, in the automotive sector, today's vehicles contain a tremendous amount of electronics and software. In fact, one of our large OEMs predicted that more than half the cost of their vehicle lines will be related to the electronics and software area by 2011. Aerospace and defense industry products have always included a large proportion of electronics and software, but the complexity has greatly increased as more partners are utilizing software and there are more subsystems to integrate. As consumers, we only have to look at our mobile phones, medical devices, and home entertainment systems to realize the increasing reliance on software in the electronics industry.
The benefits to business innovation provided by software are changing the fundamentals of how product companies compete. Yet, the impact of software on the development ecosystem has become even more complex in what was already a very complex environment.
- Software provides devices with greater intelligence, interactivity, capability, usability, and safety than mechanical and electronic hardware alone.
- The "softness" of software means that product capabilities are no longer constrained by the hard physics of what can or cannot be achieved with mechanical and electronic hardware.
- Software can provide wide diversity in product features and functions within a product line portfolio, making it easier for companies to pursue many different market segments with precisely targeted product variations.
Delivering more product diversity with a software-based product portfolio requires systems organizations to move away from lifecycle approaches focused on individual applications and towards a lifecycle approach for a complete product line, similar to the proven assembly line paradigm found in manufacturing.
As one of our largest systems customers stated, "We need to be faster and more efficient in the way we develop and deliver products than how we have done things for the last twenty years."
A new product line engineering approach
A new engineering approach -- referred to as Software Product Lines (SPL), or more precisely product line engineering (PLE) -- has emerged to infuse more intelligence into the process, tools, and best practices used to develop, deliver, and evolve a product line portfolio through each stage of the lifecycle.
Most organizations find that delivering a product line using traditional product-centric approaches leads to tremendous growth in complexity, plus higher development costs and inefficiencies, especially when responding to change. This new approach to product line engineering allows organizations to evolve their product portfolios by fully capitalizing on commonality and effectively managing the variation across the portfolio, as well as across each stage of the lifecycle. The result is improved productivity, quality, and efficiency in the way teams develop systems and software. Companies that do not harvest the commonality or manage the multiplicity of their products risk losing the ability to improve time-to-market, engineering costs, portfolio size, or defect rates by any effective factor.
In response to our customers, the IBM Rational® organization is investing in and evolving a product line engineering solution that allows organizations to develop and deploy new products based on the specific features required to meet our customers' needs and rapidly changing market demands.
By managing a portfolio based on common and varying features across the entire development lifecycle, organizations can simplify development processes and organizational structures and achieve order-of-magnitude improvements in productivity and product line scalability, while reducing product defect rates. This end-to-end lifecycle approach allows the delivery of product diversity at the speed and efficiency level it takes to satisfy today's cost-conscious, "want it new, want it now" consumers and businesses. This advanced yet pragmatic approach has opened up new frontiers in innovation and economies of scale, impacting the fundamentals of how teams deliver products.
We have successfully delivered a solution for supporting product line engineering using products from IBM Rational and BigLever Software (Gears SPL Lifecycle Framework).
The relationship with BigLever originated from the growing interest and demand among our joint customers for an integrated product line engineering solution for the development of systems and software applications. We have been very successful in our collaborative efforts, such as integrating IBM Telelogic DOORS®, Telelogic Synergy™, Rational ClearCase®, and Telelogic Rhapsody® with BigLever Software's industry-standard SPL framework to innovate systems and software delivery.
The following article -- which appeared on the Embedded.com Web site -- illustrates how Lockheed Martin is utilizing this new product line engineering approach to achieve significant gains in the development of their systems and embedded software.
Read the Lockheed Martin article.
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John Carrillo is Strategic Solutions Program Director for IBM Rational, with an emphasis on the development and delivery of software-based products and complex systems. In this role, he provides domain expertise, thought leadership, and strategic counsel regarding the use of the IBM Rational product portfolio, processes, and best practices for systems engineering and software product line engineering. He has degrees in both Electrical Engineering (EE) and Sociology from Loyola Marymount University and California State University at Long Beach, respectively, and he has completed EE graduate studies at California State University in Long Beach, CA.
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