Continuous Integration Beyond the Team: A Tooling Perspective on Challenges in the Automotive Industry

Paper in proceeding, 2016

The practice of Continuous Integration (CI) has a big impact on how software is developed today. Shortening integration and feedback cycles promises to increase software quality, feature throughput, and customer satisfaction. Thus, it is not a surprise that companies try to embrace CI in domains where it is rather difficult to implement. In this paper we present our findings from two rounds of interviews with a car manufacturer on the use of tools in system engineering and how these tools would support wider adoption of CI. Our findings suggest a complex tool landscape with immense requirements that are not easily fulfilled by existing tools; this holds also for tools that well support CI in other domains. From this notion, we fur- ther explore what makes the automotive domain challeng- ing when it comes to CI (namely complexity of system and value chain). We hope that our findings will help address such challenges.