A Study Investigating Challenges in the Interface Between Product Development and Manufacturing in the Development of Software-Intensive Automotive Systems

Abstract

The automotive industry is facing a tremendous growth in the engineering of software-intensive systems, giving rise to various challenges. To prevent problems related to the fit of new software technologies in vehicles and the manufacturing processes, a well functioning interaction between the functions for product development and manufacturing is crucial. This is complicated by the fact that the changeable nature of software development causes unprecedented needs for collaboration and coordination between these two functions. This paper reports on a process assessment that focuses on the interface between the functions for product development and manufacturing in the development and design of software-intensive automotive systems. The main purpose of the study was to identify the key issues for improvement in the area assessed. The assessment was performed at two Swedish automotive companies where data were collected from documents and in interviews with practitioners. Nine key improvement issues were established ranging from challenges in requirements engineering to the need for knowledge transfer between manufacturing and product development. In addition, to increase the understandability of the results and map possible avenues for solution and future research, the paper provides an extensive analysis of each improvement issue in relation to the state-of-the-art.

Software Process Improvement in Inter-departmental Development of Software-Intensive Automotive Systems – A Case Study

“…1 shows the overall process for the SPI project, and the sub-steps used in this study for the IP in Step 3, each detailed below. The selection and PA (Steps 1 and 2) are reported in [11].…”

“…The number of employees is about 17,000 and approximately 75,000 trucks are produced in 16 countries (2010) [30]. Both companies are organized as matrix organizations and uses a traditional plan-based approach including a stage gate model for governing the development of the complete car and the V-model to present an overview of design and verification of inherent softwareintensive systems [11,15]. Currently, this approach is commonly used in the automotive industry [3,31] and thus should strengthen the possibility to generalize some of the findings reported in this paper, at least to the automotive domain.…”

“…But also across departments (inter-departmental issues). In particular, the inter-departmental interaction between Product Development (PD) and Manufacturing (Man) has been recognized in research and industry as a key challenge [7][8][9][10][11].…”

“…The inter-departmental interaction in our definition includes all the phases of development, from concept (e.g., exploration of requirements and solutions) to design, implementation and validation, but also manufacturing involving pre-production verification and validation of the manufacturing processes cf. [11,15,16]. In a new car model project, these activities commonly span over three to four years [15], [16].…”

“…This paper presents a study on the improvement planning (IP) of nine improvement issues identified in the prior process assessment (PA) step in iFLAP reported in [11]. The main purpose of this study is to establish a realistic planning of the development and implementation of improvements determined from priorities and dependencies between the nine issues, as well as risk and cost of implementation, and time to return on investment (TTROI).…”