Manuela Kohlhas is an experienced marketing expert with over a decade of experience, focusing on B2B technology companies. She has held senior positions in various organizations, where she has driven strategic marketing initiatives. She holds a degree in business administration and studied for a Master's in Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship at the Nuremberg Institute of Technology and Linköping University in Sweden.
As products become increasingly complex and software-driven, managing configurations, variants, and compliance across global teams is no longer optional—it’s mission-critical. Engineering organizations are under pressure to deliver faster, with higher quality, while proving compliance at every step.
With the latest releases of Codebeamer and Pure Variants, new capabilities are now available to help organizations innovate faster, scale smarter, and stay in control of growing complexity. To understand what’s changed—and why it matters—it’s worth starting with the core: how configurations are managed in the first place.
Streams: The backbone of modern configuration management
At the heart of this release wave is Streams, introduced in Codebeamer 3.1 Streams fundamentally rethink configuration management by allowing teams to create cross-project configurations that mirror real-world product structures—rather than forcing products into rigid, tool-centric hierarchies.
This approach enables:
- Scalable Reuse: Efficiently manage modular architectures and platform strategies across product families.
- Live Consistency: Avoid data duplication and maintain end-to-end traceability across every variant and release.
- Built-in Compliance: Support governance for standards like ISO 26262, IEC 62304, and others directly in the process.
With Streams and smart relative references, even very large configurations can be loaded and navigated in an instant. The result is less storage overhead, fewer silos, and faster development cycles.
Once configuration structures are in place, the next challenge emerges: how to keep them in sync as teams work in parallel.
Stream baselines: Locking down configurations for confidence
While Streams provide flexibility for managing configurations, there are moments when stability matters most—such as audits, compliance checks, or major release milestones. Stream Baselines address this need by creating immutable snapshots of a Stream’s state at a given point in time. These baselines preserve every item and relationship, ensuring teams can freeze configurations for certification or rollback purposes without disrupting ongoing development. With baseline support now extended across Codebeamer and Pure Variants, organizations gain a secure foundation for variant management and compliance, even in highly regulated environments.
Delta merge (Beta): Simplifying complex merges
In environments with multiple variants and parallel development streams, merging changes can become a major pain point. Traditional approaches often involve manual effort, error-prone copy-paste, and long review cycles. Delta Merge (Beta) in Codebeamer 3.2 is designed to change that.
Building on the foundation of Streams, Delta Merge (Beta) introduces:
- Automated Difference Detection: Changes across streams are quickly identified using item content hashes.
- Interactive Conflict Resolution: Teams can resolve merge conflicts with clear, guided tools instead of ad hoc workarounds.
- Performance at Scale: Large enterprise projects benefit from reduced merge times—often going from hours to minutes.
Note: Delta Merge is currently available as part of a limited Beta program. Customers who are interested can work with PTC to enroll and gain early access.
For teams practicing Product Line Engineering (PLE), this matters enormously. Delta Merge keeps shared components synchronized, while product-specific variations remain clean and well-structured. In other words, configuration complexity becomes something you can manage—and even turn into a competitive advantage—rather than something you fear.
Of course, configuration management is only one side of the PLE story. The other is variant management across domains, which is where Pure Variants comes in.
Advanced variant management for complex portfolios
Pure Variants 7.2 addresses one of the toughest challenges in Product Line Engineering: maintaining control as variability scales.
While Streams and Delta Merge provide a strong foundation for configuration management and synchronization, feature-based PLE takes this to the next level. Pure Variants 7.2 enables automated, consistent population of variant-specific streams with platform assets, as well as updates of those streams over time.
Here’s how the value differs:
- Streams + Delta Merge: Offer flexibility for managing configurations, creating baselines, and merging changes across parallel development streams.
- Feature-Based PLE (with Pure Variants): Automates the generation of streams and stream baselines, and leverages Delta Merge when parallel evolution occurs. This approach gives customers the freedom to implement new capabilities either at the platform level (reusable from the start) or at the variant level (solve challenges in context first, then generalize and feed back into the product line for reuse).
The result is a scalable, structured way to manage complexity: combining modular reuse with controlled variability, while maintaining compliance and traceability across the entire product lifecycle.
By strengthening integration, visibility, and flexibility, the release enables organizations to manage complex product portfolios without sacrificing governance or speed. Enhanced baseline integration with Codebeamer, expanded modeling flexibility, and improved monitoring capabilities help teams manage variability with confidence—even in distributed or restricted environments.
Taken together, Codebeamer and Pure Variants give engineering organizations a connected view of their product variants—from system-level models down to individual requirements and tests.
Where it all connects: Digital product traceability
Each of these capabilities plays a role in weaving a connected lifecycle that supports speed, quality, and regulatory assurance.
Why digital product traceability matters
Digital Product Traceability (DPT) is about more than linking a few artifacts together. It’s about establishing a connected thread that runs through every requirement, design decision, risk, test, and compliance artifact across the entire product lifecycle.
With these capabilities organizations can:
- Prove Compliance Effortlessly: Create immutable baselines and automatically maintain traceability for audits and assessments.
- Adapt Quickly: Respond to last-minute changes in requirements or regulations with confidence, knowing exactly what will be impacted.
- Collaborate Globally: Enable distributed and cross-functional teams to work from a single source of truth, regardless of geography or function.
DPT turns traceability from a reactive reporting task into a proactive capability that supports better decisions, earlier.
Looking ahead
These releases are not isolated feature drops—they represent a strategic step forward on the journey to connected, intelligent product development. By combining modern configuration management, robust variant control and powerful merge capabilities PTC is helping engineering organizations turn Complexity into clarity, and Compliance into confidence. As product development continues to evolve, this integrated foundation will enable teams to stay ahead—delivering safer, smarter, and more competitive products in less time.
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