Software Product Lines
The increasing complexity of software-intensive systems complicates the corporate pressure to reduce cost which is driving organizations to find innovative ways to improve the engineering process, increase the exploitation of existing design solutions, maximise the efficient use of engineering resources (eg. multi-site development teams) and leverage the use of lower cost offshore development resources. With increased demands, there is an increasing urgency to better integrate across engineering disciplines in an organization. The recent introduction of new standards such as SysML and the emerging UPDM standard are attracting significant interest as an enabler to allow historical disparate engineering disciplines to work closely together within project teams.
Use of international design standards also enables companies to support outsourcing development with unambiguous design specifications required to enable the retention of all IP minimizing the risk of contractor lock-in.
Reuse can be significantly improved when system architecture designs are captured in a form which allows businesses to not only support better product evolution but to also identify generic reusable components which can be exploited across projects and product variants. There has been significant success with the use of Software Product Lines, the leading methodology advocated by the SEI – there are a number of compelling success stories already in the public domain. (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/). Artisan Studio’s model management and extensibility capabilities are integrated to support SPL strategies.
To exploit the benefits of SPL, does require change to the engineering process and must be continuously reviewed and improved. The SPL process must be adhered to achieve maximum value. Artisan Software has always advocated the use of modeling to improve design – particularly to provide an environment for requirements, systems and software engineers to work together in an integrated design environment. Artisan Studio’s integrated development environment provides the flexibility required to allow for changes in both process and the tools used in product development without wasting valuable engineering resources to create and maintain the IDE. All of Artisan’s products are part of a strategy to support the Work-as-One objective – in addition to providing a modeling solution Artisan also has the VDS (V- Design System) which is an integrated engineering environment to provide the infrastructure required to support the complete engineering lifecycle.
