Benefits and Costs of Taseon Intellectual Property

Core Asset
Product Requirements: Product requirements are written for the TN320 system. Additional requirements were specified for the TN800, which are deltas or increment to the base requirements. Architecture: Architecture for the product line is the blueprint for how each new product will be built. Architecture for software system represents a large investment in both time and money.

Benefit
Commonality and variations in both TN320 and TN800 are documented explicitly. New system such as the TN800 will be much simpler to specify because the requirements are reused and tailored. Therefore, feasibility is assured. The quality goals for a software system such as performance, reliability, modifiability, scalability and so on are taken into consideration in the architecture. When building a new system such as the TN800 or similar product its just a matter of instantiating the same architecture. Significant amount of time and risk will be saved. Majority will be reused without modification but some will be tailored to the new system that will be built. This provides significant savings in building a software system for TN800 or similar product.

Additional Cost
Capturing requirements for a new product without any base requirements will require sophisticated analysis and reviews. These will be minimized for TN800 or similar product since base requirements already exist. Reusing the existing architecture in TN800 or similar product brings significant savings in building the product.

Software Components (in-house) Software components built in-house that form the software framework are building blocks for developing a software system for a product line.

Software Components (Commercial) Several commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software components were incorporated in the software framework. Performance Modeling and Analysis In order for a product to meet the performance criteria an analysis must be performed. This exercise was done in the TN320 system development cycle. Business case, market analysis, cost and schedule estimates These are the business necessities involved in any product. These are already established in the TN320 product. Tools and processes for software

Motivation for using COTS components that are complex to build is to reduce overall development time and costs. These components are designed to be robust and extensible which are applicable to a product line. A new product such as the TN800 or similar product can be built with high confidence that real-time and distributed-system related issues would significantly be reduced since majority of the code base underwent extensive performance modeling and analysis. All of these business necessities are already established for the TN800 at least in a generic form and can be reused.

Some unique components such as device drivers will have to be developed from scratch to support the new hardware platform. Since the software framework uses industry standard hardware interface such as SA Forums HPI significant cost saving in developing drivers for ATCA-based chassis and hardware. Some COTS components require annual maintenance license fee.

Additional tweaks and optimization may be required. Same performance modeling and analysis can be applied.

All of the business artifacts were made extensible to accommodate product variations.

Development tools, change

Enhancement to an existing

development and change management The infrastructure for developing a software product requires a software development process and tool support.

Test infrastructure, test cases, test plans, test data These are testing artifacts for testing a particular product.

management tools and procedure, management processes, and the overall software development process are already established. Same development infrastructure can be used for new product development such as the TN800 or similar product. Test development platform, test plans, test cases, test scripts and test data have already been developed and reviewed

development infrastructure may be required for further improvement if necessary.