Growing Product Lines
If you are managing rapidly growing product lines with multiple versions and variants that share software components, you face one of the most difficult problems in software engineering today. The rate of change across product lines, as driven by software, is unprecedented and this alone presents a major challenge to your organization’s ability to deliver that software. Beyond the rate of change, software increasingly represents both the greatest opportunity for innovation as well as the greatest impact on customer experience - this creates significant risk in terms of quality, cycle time, time to market, and ultimately customer satisfaction.
Detecting and managing defects in software across variants is one part of managing product lines that has huge impact on your business. If you discover a defect in one device or application, do you know what else across the product family will be affected? Many organizations cannot answer this question at all; for others, getting the answer takes far too much time and effort. This leads to discovering and fixing the same defect over and over again – the delays, wasted effort and rework across that portfolio leads to significant risk and cost. To address this challenge, you need to reliably and transparently relate all software assets and related activities across all relevant products and projects (which in turn demands a solution that can provide a single source of truth across all of these assets).
The table below lists common challenges that impact software product lines, along with the MKS platform capabilities that will help you solve them.
| Issue | MKS Solution Capability and Benefits |
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| Inability to Consistently Manage All Development Assets Many organizations struggle with managing features, requirements, specifications, design, code, and tests in a consistent and effective manner. This is a key step in order to improve management of product lines and variants. |
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| Duplicated Effort Across Products & Lines Code and component reuse is relatively common but too often it is "clone and own" reuse, not reuse by reference. Reuse must also be automated and extended across all assets from features and requirements through to test cases and test results. |
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| Disconnected Tools and Repositories Data redundancy, siloed processes, and disconnected tools lead to significant manual intervention; with that comes a high percentage of preventable errors. |
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