Product Line Engineering

Delivering high-quality products at an attractive price point, just at the right time, is the holy grail of product development. We help our customers achieve this goal through holistic product line engineering enabled by Pure Variants, a variant management software.

What is product line engineering and how does it work?


Product line engineering (PLE) is a methodology for developing and maintaining a family of similar products (variants) as a cohesive unit, leveraging shared engineering assets. Originating in software product lines, PLE now applies universally, focusing on systems and software engineering.

PLE is crucial for managing product complexity, market demands, and unforeseen customer requirements. It develops entire product families from inquiry through hardware, software, and testing, using common components and technical artifacts. Viewing related products as a unit simplifies development and management.

Unlike the classic waterfall model, which is linear and sequential, PLE allows for flexibility and reuse of components. PLE maximizes efficiency by reusing common data across products, streamlining engineering and maintenance, and reducing redundancy.

PLE can be described as both a strategic approach and a method, bridging software and hardware and facilitated by tools such as Pure Variants, a variant management tool.

Core Benefit: PLE maximizes efficiency by reusing common data across products, streamlining engineering and maintenance, and reducing redundancy.

Why is product line engineering important?

Product line engineering (PLE) is crucial for managing the growing complexity of products and meeting diverse market demands. By leveraging shared engineering assets, PLE enables the efficient development of entire product families, reducing redundancy and streamlining processes. It bridges the gap between software and hardware, driving innovation and ensuring high-quality, cost-effective product development. PLE maximizes resource utilization, enhances flexibility, and simplifies product management.

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What is holistic product line engineering?

Modern systems engineering relies on shared assets like requirements, models, code, and tests. Holistic product line engineering (PLE) aims to manage all variability-related information in a single source of truth, applying it uniformly across all assets. This approach handles product differences and configurations, automatically creating various versions of product assets. Holistic PLE ensures that all stakeholders (managers, engineers, customers) have access to consistent information on variability and product configurations.

What are the advantages of PLE?

Consistent product quality

Utilizes common core components across all product variants, maintaining high and consistent quality.

Utilizes common core components across all product variants, maintaining high and consistent quality.

Accelerated product development

Speeds up development and decreases time to market by reusing shared assets and automating the creation of product variants.

Speeds up development and decreases time to market by reusing shared assets and automating the creation of product variants.

Enhanced innovation

Expands product innovation capacity by integrating software and hardware development, fostering collaboration, and enabling rapid introduction of new features.

Expands product innovation capacity by integrating software and hardware development, fostering collaboration, and enabling rapid introduction of new features.

Scalability

Facilitates swift expansion and addition of new variants by managing product configurations centrally and efficiently reusing components.

Facilitates swift expansion and addition of new variants by managing product configurations centrally and efficiently reusing components.

Optimized efficiency through asset reuse

Utilizes shared engineering assets like requirements, models, code, and tests across product families, reducing duplication and speeding up development.

Utilizes shared engineering assets like requirements, models, code, and tests across product families, reducing duplication and speeding up development.

Reduced time to market

Enhances market presence and competitiveness by reducing time to market for new variants, offering a competitive edge through faster adaptation.

Enhances market presence and competitiveness by reducing time to market for new variants, offering a competitive edge through faster adaptation.

Everything is potentially reusable

With Pure Variants, everything is potentially reusable. By systematically managing variability across a product line, Pure Variants allows organizations to identify and leverage commonalities in their software and system components. This approach ensures that features, assets, and configurations can be efficiently tailored to meet specific needs, minimizing duplication, and maximizing the value of existing resources. The result is a streamlined development process where every element has the potential to contribute to future products, embodying the principle of total reusability.

What role does variant management play in PLE?

Variant management is crucial in product line engineering (PLE), as it enables the efficient handling of variations across a product family. It allows organizations to manage and reuse core assets, ensuring consistency and reducing duplication. By systematically controlling variations, companies can quickly adapt to market demands, improve product quality, and reduce time to market. Effective variant management also supports scalability and customization, enhancing overall productivity and innovation. PLE can be described as both a strategic approach and a method, facilitated by tools such as Pure Variants, a variant management tool.

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The future of PLE

By facilitating systematic, automated, and traceable asset reuse, PLE reduces maintenance efforts, enhances product quality, and accelerates time to market compared to manual variant configuration. For companies developing complex systems with multiple product variants, effective variant management is essential for holistic PLE. PLE is bridging the gap between software and hardware to drive innovation across industries, allowing products to become as complex as needed with the support of advanced engineering tools.

Pure Variants accelerates product development at PALFINGER

PALFINGER, a global leader in crane and lifting solutions, faced increasing complexity in managing control unit parameters. They adopted Pure Variants from pure-systems to handle this variability. Within two years, they successfully integrated the solution, enhancing performance and enabling over-the-air updates. This investment has proven worthwhile, ensuring PALFINGER remains at the forefront of innovation and quality.

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Efficient variant management with Pure Variants

Pure Variants as a software platform helps customers reuse their system and software engineering assets throughout the entire product lifecycle, based on a product line engineering (PLE) approach.

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Product line engineering frequently asked questions

How can product line engineering accelerate product development?

Product line engineering (PLE) can significantly accelerate product development by streamlining the management of product variants and optimizing processes. Here’s how:

  • Efficient Variant Management: PLE allows companies to manage all product variants and assets efficiently across departments, reducing time spent on manual updates and speeding up development.
  • Quick Feasibility Checks: Software-based variant management enables rapid assessment of new product variants, saving weeks or months and reducing costs.
  • Focus on Innovation: Automating routine tasks and moving away from outdated methods like spreadsheets allows developers to focus on core competencies, leading to more innovations.

Fast Implementation: Tools like Pure Variants can be quickly implemented, providing immediate improvements in efficiency and speed.

In today's competitive landscape, time management is crucial. The fast overtake the slow.

How can AI transform product line engineering?

AI can revolutionize product line engineering (PLE) by enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving product quality. Here are key ways AI can transform PLE:

  • Automated Feature Extraction: AI analyzes legacy artifacts to extract features, reducing manual effort.
  • Variability Management: AI identifies and manages variability information, optimizing product configurations.
  • Predictive Analytics: AI predicts maintenance needs, optimizes supply chains, and forecasts market trends.
  • Customer Insights: AI processes customer feedback to identify popular features and areas for improvement.
  • Innovation and Customization: AI suggests new features and configurations based on market analysis and customer preferences.
  • End-to-End Integration: AI provides real-time insights across the PLE process, ensuring continuous improvement.

By leveraging these capabilities, AI helps companies streamline PLE processes, reduce costs, and deliver products that better meet customer demands. How do you see AI impacting your work or industry?

Do you need standards for product line engineering?

Standards are vital in product line engineering (PLE), as they provide a unified framework and terminology, ensuring consistency and quality across tools and processes. For example, ISO 26580:2021 outlines best practices for the feature-based approach to PLE, helping organizations align their methods with industry standards. Standards like AUTOSAR, SysML v2, and OASIS Variability Exchange Language (VEL) enable seamless data exchange and collaboration between different tools and systems, which is crucial in complex industries like automotive. These standards ensure that various models and data domains can integrate effectively. While no single standard can cover all aspects of PLE, having multiple, aligned standards allows for flexibility and innovation. They provide the necessary structure to manage variability and ensure effective integration of product line components.

In summary, standards are essential for PLE, as they guide managing complexity, ensuring quality and fostering collaboration across different domains and tools.

What is software product line engineering?

Modern systems engineering requires various kinds of shared engineering assets, including requirements, models, code, and tests. Instead of managing variability and product configurations with vendor-specific concepts and tools for each asset, the goal of holistic PLE is to maintain all variability-related information in a single source of truth and apply this information uniformly across all assets. This includes the management of variability and product configurations, as well as the (automated) derivation of variant assets. This way, holistic PLE helps give all stakeholders (managers, engineers, and customers) access to the same consistent information regarding variability and product configurations.

What are the different roles in product line engineering?

Product line engineering (PLE) comes with its own specific roles. To establish a holistic variant management, almost all stakeholders across product lines will be involved, from business analysts to requirements engineers to software developers to QA engineers, etc. The stakeholders participate in different PLE activities, which are divided into five PLE-specific roles. The graphic below illustrates in which phases of the PLE activities the specific roles are involved.

Product line engineer

In product line engineering (PLE), a product line engineer is responsible for modeling and maintaining variability information in feature models. This role involves collaborating with domain experts to extract variability information from legacy artifacts and brainstorming to create comprehensive feature models.

Product portfolio manager

Adopting the product line engineering approach, the product portfolio manager is responsible for the overall product portfolio and for identifying what efficiencies can be achieved, for example, determining the direction for the product portfolio, analyzing and optimizing the product portfolio, and making the transition to PLE.

Domain assets engineer

Domain assets engineer is not a job title, but a role in PLE activities who works on building up and maintaining the product line assets in the digital forms, for instance, requirements, source code, test cases, architecture models, and so on. Hence, if you are a requirements engineer, a software developer, or a system architect, you could also act as a domain assets engineer in PLE focusing on the superset of the engineering assets with identified variability information.

Application assets engineer

Application assets engineers are responsible for variant-specific assets, for example, the variant-specific requirements, source code, architecture models, etc. After deriving the variant-specific assets, application assets engineers can continuously work on them.

Configurator

In PLE activities, configurator is not a job title but a role that is responsible for configuring a variant based on requirements from customers/stakeholders. Different roles can be involved in the process of configuring a variant based on development model, for example, product owners, application owners, application stakeholders, or business analysts.

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