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How SLI and DevOps Are Transforming Car Development

Automotive software development faces significant challenges due to the scale and complexity of integrating software from hundreds of global suppliers. This document discusses how applying principles of lean software delivery, DevOps, and connecting previously disconnected tools and processes across the automotive supply chain can help address these challenges. Key points include: 1) Automating requirements traceability and visibility across the entire software supply chain can improve efficiency, reduce errors, and enable continuous improvement. 2) Integrating planning and tracking tools used by suppliers can streamline defect management and improve delivery speed by orders of magnitude. 3) Applying DevOps principles around automated testing and deployment can help reduce cycle times for automotive software, though the production environment presents unique challenges

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35 views

How SLI and DevOps Are Transforming Car Development

Automotive software development faces significant challenges due to the scale and complexity of integrating software from hundreds of global suppliers. This document discusses how applying principles of lean software delivery, DevOps, and connecting previously disconnected tools and processes across the automotive supply chain can help address these challenges. Key points include: 1) Automating requirements traceability and visibility across the entire software supply chain can improve efficiency, reduce errors, and enable continuous improvement. 2) Integrating planning and tracking tools used by suppliers can streamline defect management and improve delivery speed by orders of magnitude. 3) Applying DevOps principles around automated testing and deployment can help reduce cycle times for automotive software, though the production environment presents unique challenges

Uploaded by

nericsso
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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e-book

How Software Lifecycle Integration and DevOps are


transforming car development
Why is it so difficult for the industry that created lean
manufacturing to apply the concepts of lean to software
delivery?

Automotive development trends are creating the need for a whole new scale ONE CAR = 100 MILLION LINES OF CODE
of software-centric innovation and are expanding the software in tomorrow’s
car beyond 200 million lines of code. Software is becoming the most expensive
part of the car, and large-scale software delivery is one of the most challenging
endeavors an organization can undertake. Lean software delivery has been
notoriously difficult to achieve at enterprise scale, no matter what the industry,
and connecting it to manufacturing adds another level of complexity. The
organizations that master large-scale software delivery will thrive, while those
who get trapped in its many pitfalls will fall further and further behind.

CHALLENGES
One of the biggest problems is that automotive suppliers don’t have real
control throughout their supply chains, because they use massive numbers
of parts suppliers in locations across the globe. Add to that, the fact that CONNECT THE SOFTWARE SUPPLY CHAIN
these suppliers have many divisions, using many different software tools, and Just as the world around us is transforming into a set of Internet of Things
you can see the monumental challenge. One prominent automotive parts (IoT) devices with microprocessors and sensors, so is the world within the car.
supplier uses 26 different software tools, for example. Meanwhile, there are These parts come from dozens of suppliers, and all of those microprocessors
no real standards for tools, which adds to the complexity of the tool chain. are running more and more code. This has transformed a hardware and
And for auto manufacturers to be successful, they must get these tools to part centric supply chain, which the world has learned to manage via lean
communicate with one another. Beyond this, there is limited visibility in the manufacturing principles originating from the Toyota Production System (TPS),
process. to a software supply chain.
SUPPLY CHAIN INTEGRATION
Managing a software supply chain requires managing the lifecycles of CASE STUDY
numerous applications across company boundaries. Tool support is critical to
make this management possible. Although it is sometimes feasible to make
everyone use the same Source Code Management (SCM) system, as has
been demonstrated by the success of the Android ecosystem which forced
members of the ecosystem to use Git, it is not possible to make suppliers use
the same requirement, defect and issue tracking tools as those tend to be
development platform and company size specific. As a result, a new layer of
integration infrastructure is required to connect the planning and tracking
layer of the ecosystem. Without it, the speed of delivery is limited by the
efficiency of sending around spreadsheets of requirements and defects
via email. When an integration hub is put in place to connect suppliers, a An automotive supplier greatly improved their relationship with
Lean software supply chain becomes possible. For instance, as soon as a a major automotive manufacturer through tool integration.
defect is found in a test drive or simulation, that defect can be routed in They increased the consistency of their data, enabling better
real-time to the right software supplier, and as soon as the supplier commits communication and driving down synchronization time to less than
a fix and updates the workflow status of the defect in their issue tracker, 10 seconds.
the simulation or test drive can be rescheduled. When you consider the
bottleneck that managing tens of thousands requirements across millions of Would you like to learn more?
lines of code via email and spreadsheets causes, there’s a clear 10x efficiency To request the ‘Supply Chain Integration’ case study, click the email
and speed gain to be had. Connecting automotive software supply chains is us button below:
one of the most impactful and interesting deployments of Tasktop today.
Email Us
GAIN VISIBILITY ACROSS THE SOFTWARE SUPPLY CHAIN
Connecting the software value stream across suppliers enables efficiency, with
artifacts such as requirements and defects moving in real-time instead of being
batched up and becoming bottlenecks. Equally important as gaining efficiency
is a gain in visibility of how software development is proceeding across the
software supply chain. Without visibility, it is impossible to identify bottlenecks
and to apply the continuous improvement that transformed manufacturing to
the world of software. When your software suppliers are not connected to your
organization’s lifecycle, you are relying on slow, manual, error and opinion prone
methods of reporting. When that connectivity is automated, it becomes easy to
see that a particular software component is causing a disproportionate number
of defects or performance problems, and to quickly adapt. This is as important
for traditional supplier relationships as it is for open source dependencies. For
example, if an open source component you depend on just raised a security issue
in their issue tracker, and your organization does not have that security defect
appear immediately within its own lifecycle tools, you are now much more likely
to release a component with that vulnerability. Forward-thinking automotive
manufacturers are teaching us that visibility and continuous improvement are
needed not just across your organization’s developers and IT staff, but across the
entire software supply chain. This need to provide an infrastructure layer that
can provide this visibility has been one of the main drivers for the rapid uptake of
Tasktop Data.

AUTOMATE REQUIREMENTS TRACEABILITY


Requirements traceability is a critical, and often a regulatory requirement, for
devices that we fly or drive around in. But, it is notoriously difficult and expensive
to gain this traceability, resulting in the traceability gap, which causes additional
non-value add work and re-work to connect requirements to defects to tests to
builds, and so on, as things change. And with the pace of today’s delivery, change
is the only constant. The problem is not the change itself, it’s the disconnected
nature of the change. For example, when developers change a line of code, they
generally know the requirement on which they are working and on the release
the change will go into. But they tend not to update 3 or more systems voluntarily
when making that change. By creating an integration layer that connects the and cycle time gains of DevOps for embedded systems and devices.
creation or update of any artifact to the downstream and upstream artifacts,
such as requirements and builds, it is possible to completely automate CONCLUSION
requirements traceability. As an example, this results in audits of R&D that
The automotive industry is once again back at the forefront of technological
require almost no effort, and delivery that is much more productive because
innovation, and poised to have a very positive impact on everything from our
developers can instantly pull up the code relevant to a changed requirement
safety to the shape of our cities in the coming decades. Effective large-scale
from any OEM partners.
software delivery is the discipline that will determine the success and the timing
of these changes. Tasktop is on a mission to transform large-scale software
APPLY DEVOPS PRINCIPLES TO SYSTEMS ENGINEERING delivery, and working closely with the leading automotive and manufacturing
The lessons above fall into the bucket of applying scaled Agile and Lean customers to make their vision a reality. If you’re interested in joining the
principles to software delivery. The other pillar that remains is connecting the conversation, please let us know.
build, test and deployment parts of the software lifecycle in order to reduce
not just the development part, but the overall cycle time. The challenge with
manufacturing is just how different the environment that the deployed product
is tested and used in is from the development environment. If you’re developing
a web app, your operational and test environment are almost identical, and
a combo of VMs or better yet Docker containers, along with some service
virtualization and test data automation, mean that you have an automated layer
for finding defects and then deploying to production. Contrast that with a car,
where the production environment could be flying down the road at 200 km/h
and disconnected from any network. But the principles of DevOps still apply,
in that the more you can automate the connectivity and process of testing and
deployment, the more successful you will be. So the grand challenge becomes
creating a virtual environment where the principles of DevOps can apply to
manufacturing. This has to go well beyond the test automation that we do for IT
projects, which is why simulation is such an important trend in manufacturing.
Once the production environment is simulated, it is possible to gain the velocity
To learn more about how Tasktop can help your business email us at: [email protected] or call us at: +1 778-588-6896

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