Towards Vehicle DevOps

In the automotive industry, we often encounter processes and ways of working that have been designed and established at a time where the complexity of software has been much lower. 

With the complexity of in-vehicle software rising, there are significant gaps in the development process and artifacts get “thrown over the fence” to other teams, instead of a close collaboration between different functions. This leads to very long feedback cycles for changes, missing end-to-end ownership and the inability to experience the software’s functionality early. In terms of business value, it leads to slower time to deliver features to market and impacts an organization’s ability to react with agility to market trends. 

We see a similarity in this industry, to the situation that eventually led to the DevOps movement; where the gap between development and operations was closed by establishing cross-functional teams that work on a common set of principles, like shared ownership, rapid feedback and workflow automation.

We believe that the automotive industry needs to adopt this approach. Taking the unique challenges of in-vehicle software development into account we have established the practice of Vehicle DevOps, so that the tools and methods of modern software development can be applied to boost the engineering effectiveness.

Watch the recording of Michael Fait's (Head of Software Defined Vehicle Tech) talk at Automotive Europe 2023 to learn more about the practice.