Organic Evolution of Development Organizations – An Experience Report

Journal article, 2016

In areas such as Active Safety, new technologies, designs (e.g. AUTOSAR) and methods are introduced at a rapid pace. To address the new demands, and also requirements on Functional Safety imposed by ISO 26262, the support for engineering methods, including tools and data management, needs to evolve as well. Generic and file-based data management tools, like spreadsheet tools, are popular in the industry due to their flexibility and legacy in the industry but provide poor control and traceability, while rigid and special-purpose tools provide structure and control of data but with limited evolvability. As organizations become agile, the need for flexible data management increases. Since products become more complex and developed in larger and distributed teams, the need for more unified, controlled, and consistent data increases. In this paper we report the successful experience of Volvo Car Corporation (VCC) to achieve these challenges and we present a new paradigm called organic evolution of development organization. VCC has for more than ten years used an integrated model-based platform for developing their active safety systems. The platform supports distributed real-time collaboration, fine-grained versioning, and integration with specialized tools. VCC uses the platform for requirements, design, test and verification, failure mode avoidance and change management. Specifications to suppliers, ISO 26262 safety documentation and AUTOSAR templates are generated from models. The agile and lean development processes have met the increased rate of evolution in projects like the new XC90. High quality is attested by both the products and the endorsement of the development organization.