Continuous Architecture – an agile, collaborative approach for software defined cars

Authors

F. Beer, H. Szekely - Bosch Corporation, A. Malvankar, S. Riediger - FEV.io GmbH

Summary

Increasing functionality in vehicles is resulting in a higher degree of system complexity, despite shorter lead times to market [6]. Collaboration and agile development are key to solving this problem of rising complexity, so that architecture is developed in increments by multidisciplinary team. However, these teams often bring their own specialized toolchains, which makes it difficult to integrate models from various architecture tools. This increases the risk of inconsistencies which can be very expensive to re-solve, especially if detected at a later stage during integration. Furthermore, an agile development process implies that the architecture is developed incrementally [4],[7]. This incremental approach requires version handling of the architecture specification and enables continuous fast feedback on quality.

The presentation will showcase how a state-of-the-art version management workflow can be applied to system architecture development. This workflow originates from soft-ware development and facilitates shorter iteration cycles, parallel work on architecture models, and reviews of model changes in small chunks before integration. With the help of selected tooling, a virtual integration of the product architecture, authored in different tools, is performed. The integrated product architecture is automatically checked for every update against a defined set of consistency rules to provide early feedback to the development teams.

The approach includes a concept for automated generation of executable test cases from every increment of the system architecture. This efficiently serves the purpose of validating the architecture in parallel to incremental development over multiple system levels, thereby reducing feedback time and development effort.