A Strategic Framework for Automotive Systems Development

The external world is changing quickly right now, and this is affecting the automotive sector. Technological advancements such as autonomous driving, networked automobiles, and electromobility have the potential to upend an otherwise stagnant competitive landscape. These advancements have led to a need for more flexibility and shorter product release cycles due to shifting market expectations. A few examples of these demands include the request for more frequent deliveries of new product functionality, especially in the last period where most of car functionalities relies on embedded software. It has been discovered that conventional methods for developing systems and subsystems for automobiles are ineffective and can bring to be excluded from the market. Automobile manufacturers decided to introduce Agile approaches into their development process. However, the automotive industry is known for being highly regulated, which places restrictions on the application of Agile software development techniques, but drives to the use of a classic framework (i.e. Waterfall or V-Shape Model), where the product life cycle is delineated by distinct and sequential processes, that follow one another without any overlap, and each phase is characterized by extensive documentation. In this thesis is proposed a strategic framework that can be applied for the automotive system and subsystem development, tailoring Agile approaches with the relative process for system and software development defined in ASPICE standard reference model.