BigLever Software Delivers Innovative Capabilities for the Rapid Extension and Evolution of a Product Line Portfolio

Gears 5.3™ Leverages Feature Based Portfolio Evolution to Decrease Time-to-Market and Increase Product Line Scalability

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BigLever Software™, a leading provider of software product line development tools and services, today announced the release of Gears 5.3™, delivering innovative capabilities for the rapid growth, extension and evolution of a product line portfolio. By allowing development organizations to engineer their portfolio as a single system rather than multiple products, this new version of Gears enables businesses to easily and quickly develop and deploy new products using a simple feature based portfolio evolution approach.

With Gears 5.3, companies can evolve their entire portfolio using concise feature profiles that facilitate the easy addition or modification of feature requirements to meet customer need or market demand. Managing products according to feature profiles enhances collaboration and simplifies coordination across the business unit – from product marketing to engineering and development – so that new feature concepts can be rapidly incorporated into portfolio development, testing and deployment. Because of the increased scalability and ease of adding new products, the number of products in the portfolio becomes less relevant. This number can scale to the size needed to meet market opportunities, rather than being inhibited by development cost or resource limitations.

“Gears feature based portfolio capabilities are redefining the way companies create and evolve their product line,” said Charles Krueger, chief executive officer of BigLever Software. “Gears allows product marketing and development teams to meet in the morning, have a concise discussion about creating a new product, identify the specific features or features combinations needed – and by that afternoon the new product is a fully specified and configured member of the portfolio.”

Product marketing and development teams can use Gears 5.3 to negotiate future work and product line scope according to the cost/benefit of adding features to the portfolio. Product marketing can easily extend the portfolio by requesting explicit feature variations relative to existing products. This feature based approach significantly improves communication and alignment between product marketing and development – and eliminates the independent, heavyweight management of each product throughout the lifecycle, including cloned requirements documents, independent test cycles, and so forth.

About Gears 5.3

Gears is a software product line development tool that addresses the unique challenges of engineering software for a portfolio of similar products. Gears shifts the development focus from a multitude of products to a single software production line capable of automatically producing all of the products in a portfolio. Gears can be used in any or all stages of the portfolio development lifecycle, for more effective requirements management, change and configuration management, source code development, software builds, testing, and document development.

Gears 5.3 delivers the following new features and enhancements:

Feature Matrix Wizard
-- Provides a simple table-based view of product features so that product marketing and development teams can easily review and select specific features for specific products.
-- Automatically guides non-technical users (such as product marketing or sales) in viewing, selecting and extending product feature sets in order to map new market/customer requirements to current and extended portfolio capabilities.
-- Streamlines product planning and reduces "negotiation" cycles by allowing product marketing and development teams to easily:
-- identify if a new product is within or outside of the scope of the current feature set
-- extend the product line based on clear, concise view of new feature variations relative to existing products and features
--

Allows companies to fully leverage development assets and improve product quality by maximizing reuse of features and components that have been tested and proven.
-- Captures the interrelationships of the portfolio software components and provides composition rules while facilitating faster and better feature selections.

About BigLever

BigLever Software, a leading provider of software product line development tools and services, dramatically simplifies the creation, evolution and maintenance of embedded or standalone software for a product line portfolio. BigLever’s patent-pending solution, Gears, enables software development organizations to reduce development costs and bring new product line features and products to market faster, enabling businesses to more reliably target and hit strategic market windows. BigLever is based in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.biglever.com.

Copyright © 2007 BigLever Software, Inc. All rights reserved. BigLever Software, Gears, and their respective logos are trademarks of BigLever Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other company or product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.