To educate the customers, training sessions were organized on a regular base. A training session takes 3-5 days, and was held every 8 weeks with 5 to 15 trainees.

As the software product line grew in complexity and diversity, testing became a major challenge. The fact that variation points are filled in before compilation means that to test diversity the software has to be built many times with different diversity settings. Attempts were made to analyze such diversity at compile time. These attempts have not been successful yet.

Concluding Remarks

GTV is a mature software product family that has served hundreds of customers over several years. GTV was designed to support NXP’s Ultimate One Chip family of ICs for mainstream televisions, which formed a significant part of the business of NXP. GTV comes with a diversity management tool called LibCoMa that allows customers to instantiate the family for their specific hardware. This tool is interactive and feature based, and is optimized to handle variation of resource constrained code. NXP has sold hundreds of variants of the ICs, and the GTV software product family supports them all. Summarized, GTV and the accompanying hardware ICs have proved to be an example of a successful hardware/software product family.

Today, GTV continues as a world-wide software platform for NXP’s family of LCD One Chip solutions, with an increased pace of releases (using an incremental scheme), and a growing set of supporting tools.

< Previous page . . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 . . Next Chapter >