Consolidating Processes for Productivity, Efficiency, and Scalability

http://www.ibm.com/software/rational/innovate/



Charles Krueger of BigLever Software speaks about how his company integrates IBM Rational tools into its framework. It uses Rational tools to consolidate processes into a single set of activities, reducing the duplication of efforts. For example, the company is able to help a client build a single product and to customize duplicates as necessary, producing one system that can be configured easily in different ways for different systems. The streamlined process has yielded very high levels of productivity, efficiency, scalability, and time to market improvements.

"[Charles Krueger, BigLever Software]
My name is Charles Krueger. I work with BigLever Software. I'm the CEO and founder, and we're a business partner of IBM.

So BigLever Software is an ISV. We're in the emerging space of software product lines or, more specifically, systems and software product line engineering. We help companies create product lines of similar products with slight variations in features and functions. We focus on the soft assets, such as requirements, designs, source code, test cases as part of the embedded software or stand-alone software within a product line.

Therefore, we integrate the IBM Rational tools into our framework, allow those tools to support the product line variations and the full product line development life cycle.

In a product line approach, we tend to consolidate that into a single set of activities, reduce the duplication of effort, and and activities, and as a result we get very high levels of productivity, efficiency, scalability and time to market improvements, and we're not talking 10 or 20 percent. These are more of business transformation levels of improvement that can be factors of 3 to factor of 15 improvements in each of those big four areas.

So a good example of this is Lockheed Martin, and we're working with them in their ship systems group. They produce the cruisers and destroyers for the U.S. navies and other navies around the world. So the traditional way they've done that for several decades is to create each one of those ship systems as a unique configuration and it's built as a, a single product of one off or a customization for each one of those. What we're doing now is creating a consolidated, single system view of that, then saying what they really want to do is produce one system for all of those ships that can be configured easily in different ways for different systems.

And by treating it that way, then we can gain those benefits of efficiency, lack of duplication and divergence, gives us higher productivity, higher scalability, much higher degrees of automation in the process of creating each of those ship systems."

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• quality management
• soft assets
• source code
• product line engineering
• IBM Rational
• IBM
• BigLever Software
• Lockheed Martin
• Charles Krueger