The Project Manager Training Devices (PM TRADE) has been a leader within the Program Executive Office Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) and the Army in advancing the concept of a common, component-based software product-line through the introduction and development of the Common Training Instrumentation Architecture (CTIA) and Live Training Transformation (LT2) Family of Training Systems. While the traditional software product-line paradigm has proven successful in reducing stove-pipe development and the initial cost of deploying new members of the LT2 family, there are inherent complexity challenges during maintenance and evolution due to baseline divergence of the reusable software components that have been downloaded and tailored for the different product configurations. With each new product team that creates a new baseline, the cost and effort grows exponentially for merging software features and patches from the products back into the core assets and then out to other members of the product-line, leading to high cost and unmanageable complexity.

The Consolidated Product-line Management (CPM) construct incorporates a new Second Generation Software Product-line (2G SPL) paradigm that breaks divergence, and enables an automated production-line process of generating one or more products in the LT2 software product-line from a common set of core assets and feature profiles. Rather than each product team customizing a new configuration baseline, resulting in exponential complexity growth, the CPM solution builds products using innovative configuration and variation management tools plus automated production processes. This eliminates uncontrolled growth in complexity management and ultimately reduces sustainment and operations maintenance cost, and allows this saved time, cost and effort to be invested instead into innovations in the LT2 product-line.

This paper will describe the incremental approach for deploying the CPM 2G SPL and the activities that enable the Army's LT2 strategy to; 1) protect the investment in the existing LT2 core assets, 2) consolidate the LT2 product baselines using variation management and an integrated, feature-driven software product-line factory, and 3) innovate using state-of-the-art automated software tools and processes, management dashboards, and software product-line technology.