Whitepapers from IBM - Brought to you by IEEE Spectrum

IBM Rational software -- the market-leading provider of platforms for software lifecycle management - is teaming with Wind River - the global leader in the embedded and mobile industries - to help companies take the risk out of multicore software development.

This paper walks you through the best practices for maximizing innovation while minimizing the risk of investing your valuable resources in areas of low value, and includes a summary of how the IBM Rational® Focal Point™ solution assists in achieving a well balanced portfolio.

Today's difficult economy requires that many companies find ways to take cost out of their products while making them more appealing, feature-rich and intelligent. See how your organization can meet this challenge in this report by the Aberdeen Group, where you'll learn how to implement successful engineering practices that can help lead to improved profitability while avoiding risks associated with excessive costs. In addition, the report details how you can improve your systems engineering processes to develop products consisting of mechanical components, electronics and embedded software. Organizations that successfully develop products with these capabilities stand to gain a tremendous market opportunity; if done poorly, however, excessive cost is a significant risk.

This paper details the challenges and solutions available for organizations wishing to improve their software development process, reduce costs, improve quality and increase reliability of planning. It also presents examples of companies that have successfully implemented strategic QA and, as a result, have become more competitive.

To be competitive, future realtime and embedded (RTE) systems will require flexibility, scalability, power consumption and an optimized user experience. Migration into multicore platforms is imminent for the majority of realtime and embedded systems, including handheld devices for fourth-generation wireless networks. This presents a challenge to future realtime application developers — by exploiting advanced development, microkernel, load-balancing and virtualization techniques you can get an innovative approach for the timely delivery of applications on multicore hardware platforms. Working together, they represent a series of best practices for multicore systems development. This paper, based on a case study about the evolution of fourth-generation/third-generation (4G/3G LTE) wireless handsets shows how proven best practices can help you improve the quality, performance and on-time delivery of your most demanding multicore applications.

The AUTOSAR initiative has developed a layered software development approach that allows companies to cooperate on standards and to compete on implementations, enabling developers to create high-quality, reusable software components that help drive down costs, while speeding time to market. A powerful way to do this is to use an UML®/SysML profile tailored to meeting the AUTOSAR standards. This paper provides an overview of the fundamental concepts of AUTOSAR; reviews the details of an UML/SysML-based AUTOSAR profile for capturing the AUTOSAR system, including the interacting AUTOSAR software components; and shows how using UML extends the AUTOSAR system model to include effective model organization, requirements capture, and behavioral/algorithm modeling.

Software is quickly becoming an essential element of the products and systems that power our everyday lives. From global positioning system (GPS) devices in your car to implantable medical devices that deliver information directly to the doctor's office, the products we use every day are more intelligent, interconnected and instrumented than ever before. These smart, new products comprise embedded and realtime software along with electronic and mechanical components, making them highly complex and interdependent. Systems and software development teams creating these complex products are being put to the test by conflicting priorities like faster time-to-market, demands for higher quality and increasing governance requirements. This white paper explores how IBM® Rational® software integrated offerings can help you get the traceability you need to ensure overall product quality and improve project communication, too.

Component-Based Development (CBD) can help companies manage even the largest, most complex software projects. This paper describes four best practices examples where organizations have successfully deployed large, complex software projects, applications, and products composed of several hundred components and source code files, developed or maintained by several hundred to several thousand engineers on multiple sites.

With embedded product designs becoming more complex and product lifecycles shrinking, development efficiencies are essential. Fortunately, emergence of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Systems Modeling Language (SysML) standards has provided the opportunity for breakthrough gains in streamlining the development process. These standards enable engineers and software designers to significantly improve their productivity by transitioning from a code-based development process to model-driven development (MDD).

You have your breakthrough idea for your complex systems product. How quickly can you get a quality product to market? What is the difference between being first or second to market in your business? Connection and collaboration equals improved quality and speed. IBM Rational provides a collaborative systems development platform that helps you deliver higher quality systems to your market in a timely fashion. Read the whitepaper to learn more.

Globalization has given organizations around the world unprecedented access to personnel and to marketplaces. For some, this has meant the growth of the distributed organization with staff located across the world. For others, globalization has meant the routine outsourcing of functions that only a few years ago were considered core capabilities. Still others combine the practices. Most find that the benefits of working globally are many, including savings in time and money and the ability to take advantage of skills that may not be available locally. But outsourcing and its related practice, global distributed development (GDD)-in which teams of software developers who may be either employees or outsourced workers are located across geographies.also present challenges. Among them are the need to evolve architectures, relationships, cultures, and decision-making routines in ways that enable the organization to reap business benefits. Download this paper to learn about our IBM solutions for achieving true collaboration in global development.

The list of features in medical devices is rapidly rising: Even the simplest of medical devices—such as diagnostic and monitoring systems—house more and more system components, which add greater functionality to the device at a low cost. But by adding components, device software becomes complex and burdens compliance testing and premarket certification activities, such as 510(k) submissions mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

To compete in the global economy, products are expanding in scope to deliver more value and function. Products are becoming smarter: they are more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent than ever before. This paper offers ways that your company can establish a strategic advantage in managing change. It offers a structured approach to managing change in a rapidly evolving software development environment, helping you manage complex smarter product development processes — and more.

Explore smarter products and discover some best practices that business can employ to build smarter products and drive innovative technologies.

Join our panel of experts from EADS, CareFusion, and Chrysler as they discuss their experiences in implementing a structured approach to requirements management based on IBM Rational software.

If you manage, or are involved with product investment decisions for multiple products, this session will provide practical insights and tools to make your job a little bit easier. If you have difficulty explaining how multiple prodcts "fit" together, or what value customers will receive from a portfolio approach, this session will cover successful methods that are in use today.

Refine marketplace demands into robust systems requirements.

IBM® Rational® and BigLever Software have joined forces to help provide an innovative and pragmatic new SPL solution, offering organizations the infrastructure, tools, best practices and methods needed to create the industry's most advanced and efficient means of production for their software-based product lines.

Addresses five of the foremost change management challenges that CIOs have to meet and how organizations can turn these challenges into a business advantage.

Future realtime and embedded systems will require flexibility, scalability, power consumption and an optimized user experience. Migration into multicore platforms is imminent for the majority of realtime and embedded systems. This paper shows how proven best practices can improve the quality, performance and on-time delivery of your most demanding multicore applications.