Book Chapter by BigLever Execs Presents Feature Ontology for Product Line Engineering

Ontology Defines Product Line Features for all Stakeholders, Enabling PLE to Drive Engineering and Operational Efficiencies at All Levels of the Enterprise


AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 12, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BigLever Software, the long-standing leader in the Product Line Engineering (PLE) field, today announced that the company’s CEO, Dr. Charles Krueger, and its VP of customer success, Dr. Paul Clements, co-authored a chapter in the newly released book Software Engineering for Variability Intensive Systems: Foundations and Applications, published by CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group. The chapter, “A Feature Ontology to Power Enterprise-level Product Line Engineering,” describes how establishing a feature ontology, the foundation of Enterprise PLE, enables a unified feature-based variant management approach for all stakeholders across the enterprise.

“Traditional engineering approaches can no longer keep pace with the exponential growth in diversity and complexity of today’s product lines,” said Krueger. “These variant and complexity management challenges are so significant that they can impede a company’s ability to achieve strategic business objectives. Feature-based PLE has emerged specifically to meet this need. This chapter helps readers understand the essential role that a comprehensive PLE feature ontology plays in enabling organizations to plan, engineer, manufacture, deliver, maintain and evolve product lines much more efficiently and cost-effectively.”

Some of the world’s largest forward-thinking organizations, including leading automotive and A&D manufacturers, are using Feature-based PLE to achieve order-of-magnitude improvements in time to market, production efficiency, product line scalability and product quality.

“PLE has a proven track record for effectively managing product line variation in the engineering realm,” said Clements. “But now as the need to manage variation across the enterprise increases, there must be a shared understanding of how to define, describe and use features. The PLE feature ontology allows organizations to create and manage product lines based on a ‘single source of feature truth.’ All stakeholders can speak the same language, and have a role-specific view of the product line features that they need to do their jobs. This makes PLE accessible and easy to use for everyone, from individual contributors to senior executives, enabling PLE to be more quickly adopted and implemented across the enterprise.”

The Software Engineering for Variability Intensive Systems: Foundations and Applications book is edited by Ivan Mistrik, Matthias Galster and Bruce R. Maxim and is available currently on Amazon.

About Charles Krueger

With more than 30 years of experience in systems and software engineering practice, Krueger is a premier speaker, author and thought leader in the PLE arena. He has proven expertise in leading commercial product line development teams, and helping some of the world’s largest forward-thinking organizations establish leading-edge PLE practices across a spectrum of industries including automotive, aerospace, defense, aviation, alternative energy, e-commerce and computer systems. Krueger received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, where he helped to pioneer the field of systems and software product line engineering.

About Paul Clements

One of the founding fathers of the PLE field, Clements has in-depth systems and software architecture and analysis expertise, applied research experience, and proven insight for helping commercial organizations define pragmatic solutions to complex engineering problems. He was previously a senior member of the technical staff at The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and was co-author of the book, “Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns,” as well as the SEI’s first software product line case study, the “SEI Framework for Product Line Practice;” the SIMPLE modeling language for product line economics; and the International Software Product Line Conference. Prior to the SEI, he was a computer scientist with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Clements received his Ph.D. in computer science from The University of Texas at Austin.

About BigLever Software

BigLever Software is the long-standing leader in the Product Line Engineering field. BigLever’s PLE solution delivers the leading-edge technology, proven methodology, business strategy and organizational change expertise needed to efficiently transition to and operate a game-changing PLE practice. The company’s state-of-the-art PLE methods and tools provide one unified, automated approach for feature-based variant management. This approach extends across the full lifecycle, including engineering and operations disciplines; software, electrical, and mechanical domains; and tool ecosystem. BigLever is based in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.biglever.com.

Media contacts:  

Cathy Martin, BigLever Software
cmartin[at]biglever.com 
+1 (512) 565-4612
Diane Pardes, Pardes Communications, LLC
dpardes[at]pardescommunications.com 
+1 (978) 254-7948