BigLever Software Helps Bridge the Communication Gap Between Product Marketing and Software Development to Streamline Product Line Evolution.

AUSTIN, Texas -- BigLever Announces Development Tool Breakthrough at the 9th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC 2005)

BigLever Software(TM), a leading provider of software product line development tools and services, is delivering new capabilities that help align product marketing with software development to streamline the creation and evolution of products within a product line. The release of Gears(TM) 5.0 marks the industry's first integrated engineering solution designed to facilitate the translation of market need into software product line models. BigLever announced its Gears 5.0 product release today at the 9th International Software Product Line Conference in Rennes, France.

Gears provides a common language for product marketing and software development teams to communicate about the differentiating features that vary from product to product within the scope of a software product line. Gears provides visual editors and representations that function much like a spreadsheet and are used by product marketing to translate market requirements into specific combinations of product features, capabilities and benefits. These same editors and representations provide an architectural view for the software development team to model and plan their product line implementation, based on these market-driven feature combinations.

For many companies, communication between product marketing and software development about the scope and evolution of their product line is unstructured, imprecise and rife with misalignment. As a result, the product planning and negotiation process can become acrimonious, hindering effective collaboration. Most organizations face significant challenges in establishing the clarity and shared understanding needed to translate differentiating market/customer requirements into engineering effort, product line scope, and production scheduling. A lack of adequate tool support makes it difficult to capture and convey - at a high level - the features and capabilities of existing software assets that can be leveraged to create new products, or where new features are needed to extend the scope of a product line into new markets.

"The challenges that companies face in aligning product development with strategic business objectives are especially prevalent in the design and development of multiple products within a product line. The communication gap that typically exists between marketing and development organizations can have a huge negative impact on a company's ability to react to expanding or changing market demand," said Charles Krueger, CEO of BigLever Software. "With Gears 5.0, BigLever brings exciting new capabilities that establish a common language for bridging the gap between development and adjacent departments, enabling better coordination and execution of product line objectives and roadmaps."

BigLever at the 9th International Software Product Line Conference

The 9th Software Product Line Conference (SPLC 2005), held today through September 29th, is the premier forum for practitioners, researchers and educators to present and discuss recent ideas, innovations, trends, and experiences in software product line engineering.

As part of the SPLC, BigLever CEO Charles Krueger will present Scalable Software Product Line Development with BigLever Software Gears during the tools track. This presentation will focus on the innovative capabilities of Gears 5.0. Krueger will also play an instrumental role as moderator, presenter, or chair in a variety of tutorials, workshops, panels and conference sessions including the New Methods Behind the New Generation of Software Product Line Success Stories tutorial, the Software Product Line Testing workshop, and the Incremental Return on Incremental Investment: Engenio's Transition to Software Product Line Practice case study presentation co-presented by BigLever customer Engenio Information Technologies.

For more information on SPLC 2005, see the links at www.biglever.com.

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. 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 (C) 2005 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.