Engineering software for mass-produced embedded systems - Ways-of-working, architecture and ecosystems for innovation

Doctoral thesis, 2013

Software is prevalent in many products manufactured today; cars, washing machines, mobile phones, airplanes and satellites, and is often critical for the success of the product. These products are typically developed in large, and sometimes very complex, industrial projects where the manufacturing and delivery of the product is a heavier investment than the software budget. This tends to drive the entire R&D process, and software follows the process logic of the mechanical development and manufacturing setup. This thesis describes how an R&D organisation can create opportunities provided by new ways-of-working, new architectures, and possibly new supporting ecosystems. These opportunities could enable new businesses for original equipment manufacturers delivering mass-produced embedded systems, while at the same time mitigate some of the present problems when developing systems today. The thesis presents a model of five archetypical R&D approaches of industrial development of embedded software, and relates them to two different businesses. The model is based on a mapping study identifying broad approaches to embedded software development used in industry. A set of artefacts were developed to aid an organisation in operating at three of the five approaches. The set of artefacts comprise ways-of-working, architectures, open software ecosystems and innovation experiment systems. The ways-of-working focus on facilitating agile development for individual teams in the context of large projects of mass-produced embedded systems This would allow the length of iterations from idea to implementation to be determined by the potential speed of the individual development teams and not the overall product development project. The thesis presents two architectures: A compositional architecture for embedded software as a precursor for open software ecosystems, and a reference architecture supporting innovation experiment systems for embedded products as an R&D approach. Five key activities are presented to establish open software ecosystems as a possible approach to development of embedded software.