Agile Principles in Automotive Software Development: Analysis of Potential Levers

Cars are becoming software-defined products and mobility is in a transition to become a digital network business. This leads to a high pressure on automotive software developers to deliver more and more complex software in ever faster innovation cycles. The classical development process of a car is a holistic and complex systems engineering approach which delivers a fully developed car (mechanics, electrics, electronics and software) after several years of development. This car will be produced (without major changes) for many years. The automotive industry mainly applies the V-model, a complex and much elaborated development process which systematically leads from a comprehensive set of requirements to a car which exactly fits the requirements. Very much different from this, agile development methodology starts with very fuzzy and uncertain requirements and drives the development via incremental improvements with close customer integration towards a product which might deviate a lot from the initial idea. For a number of reasons, this purely agile approach is not possible for automotive development. Therefore, ongoing research is conducted on integrating agile methods into the V-model – an approach which isn’t foreseen by the Agile Manifesto. Nevertheless, substantial progress is made and the automotive industry put big hopes into this approach. This contribution identifies four promising approaches for the integration of agile methods and principles into V-model. The approaches are analysed based on a literature review. A first set of hypotheses about the possible improvement and leverage for the automotive software development is developed. The hypotheses are tested in an early validation step with industry experts in order to support the design of experiments and surveys for further research.