Towards Managing the Interaction between Manufacturing and Development Organizations in Automotive Software Development

Doktorsavhandling, 2013

The dramatic increase and importance of software in automotive systems has created many challenges not only in the development organization, but also in the manufacturing organization. This thesis focuses on the inter-departmental interaction between these two organizations in large-scale development of software-intensive automotive systems. Theoverall goal of this thesis is to identify the most prevalent challenges in this area, and develop and evaluate possible scalable, efficient and effective solutions addressing said challenges. The thesis work was conducted at two Swedish automotive companies using empirical research methods. An important contribution of this thesis are the assessment and improvement analysis and planning methods developed in order to meet industrial needs to effectively and systematically conduct process improvements in large-scale software development, while focusing on inter-departmental interaction. This included the tailoring of previously developed lightweight methods, and developing and applying novel approaches for root cause analysis and modeling and analysis of dysfunctional organizational communication patterns. Lessons learned and feedback from practitioners showed that the methods were helpful and useful to enhance the performance of the process improvement initiatives.Through the application of the assessment methods this thesis identified major challenges related to requirements engineering (RE). The substantial growth of automotive software has led to an increased need for coordination and communication of requirements and associated possible solutions across the manufacturing and development organizations. The main reasons for these challenges are lack of bidirectional communication and the information being communicated is insufficiently specified. The large amount of specifications also demands effective and efficient ways to enable and improve coordination and communication. To this end a lightweight RE framework was developed, called BRASS. It combines goal oriented requirements communication with lean based concurrent engineering, and promotes communication over achieving perfection in specifications. The applicability of BRASS was evaluated through a industrial validation, which showed that BRASS can be tailored and applied in industry and the practitioners perceived the use of BRASS as useful and effective.