Architecture for Large-Scale Innovation Experiment Systems

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Business and design decisions regarding software development should be based on data, not opinions among developers, domain experts or managers. The company running the most and fastest experiments among the customer base against the lowest cost per experiment outcompetes others by having the data to engineer products with outstanding qualities such as power consumption and user experience. Innovation experiment systems for mass-produced devices with embedded software is an evolution of current R&D practices, going from where innovations are internally evaluated by the original equipment manufacturer to where they are tried by real users in a scale relevant to the full customer base. The turnaround time from developing and deploying an embedded product to getting customer feedback is decreased to weeks, the limit being the speed of the software development teams. The paper presents an embedded architecture for realising such a novel innovation experiment system based on a set of scenarios of what to evaluate in the experiments. A case is presented implementing an architecture in a prototype in-vehicle infotainment system where comparative testing between two software alternatives was performed.