David Rubinstein: Modeling Down the Line

By David Rubinstein

August 1, 2007 —

It seems that BigLever got its peanut butter in Telelogic’s chocolate.

BigLever makes Gears, a complex application for managing product line development. That involves automating the process of creating multiple versions of software. For instance, one customer might want one set of features in its software, and another customer might want a different set, but the remainder of the code is the same. Handling that diversity in the code is what product line development is about.

Meanwhile, Telelogic is well known for its full life-cycle management suite, but a big part of what it offers is software modeling, with an emphasis on model-driven development. That means the models are not merely a visualization of software but the very foundation upon which it’s built, providing a higher level of abstraction for quick creation and deployment of applications.

In December, prodded by customers of both products, the companies got together to see how they can make BigLever’s Gears work with Telelogic’s Rhapsody modeler, which is heavily used by embedded software developers. The two chose to work with Rhapsody, as opposed to Telelogic’s Tau modeler, because much of the push was coming from customers doing embedded systems design, where hardware configurations differ but the software functionality remains the same.

Thus, the Rhapsody/Gears Bridge was born. Feature profiles are created and variation points are built into Rhapsody, which are then read and understood by the Gears product configurator. So, from one model with common elements and variation point elements, different iterations of software can be created.

Before product line development, companies would “clone and own” their software. Every product was copied from the same model and then modified as needed, resulting in full life cycles for each product and a redundancy of work. BigLever CEO Charles Krueger said, “Eighty percent of what each team was doing was the same thing.”

With the variation points now built into models, they can apply across software configuration, requirements and testing. “Now, the model elements in Rhapsody have intelligence about being configured in different ways,” Krueger said.

Krueger offered up as an example software that is created for telecommunications. Requirements include recording voice, recording video, or not recording at all. Those are the variation points. The logic in the model looks at the feature profile being requested and chooses the proper variant. The logic is then executed as it goes through the Gears product configurator, all in an automated fashion.

So, it doesn’t matter if BigLever got its peanut butter in Telelogic’s chocolate, or if Telelogic got its chocolate in BigLever’s peanut butter. For developers, the result is one sweet concoction.

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David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

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