Agile Automotive Conference

Seeing the increasing complexity and dynamics in our business and organizational environment, a large, 2000 people product development organization within Ericsson started the journey towards Agile in 2008. We early understood, that this journey can only be successful, if it is not only done by our SW development, but also involves changes in the way we run strategy, financial planning and HR.

This presentation describes how agile practices can be combined with the functional safety standard ISO 26262 when developing safety-related automotive embedded software. As such, the discussed ISO 26262 requirements are primarily focused on part 2 ‘Safety management’ and considerations on part 6 ‘Product development at the software level’, part 8 on ‘Supporting processes’ and part 9 on ‘ASIL-oriented and safety-oriented analyses’. Scrum, its workflow and roles, will be detailed as an agile method in combining agile with safety due care. The recommendations given in this presentation are outcomes of a ZVEI working group.

This session will present instances where agile thinking and practices breath fresh life into traditional problem-solving and continuous improvement tools, providing more speed, innovation and value to electrical-mechanical R&D and service. Conversely, it will demonstrate how the rigor and structure of systematic analysis and Lean Six Sigma tools have helped agile software teams to fix some of their problems more efficiently and effectively.

The presentation is about a 'Framework for scaled Simultaneous Engineering for Product Platform & Project Management'. This framework has been developed over the past years while we are developing and industrializing the 2nd generation Brake by Wire System platform starting from scratch with a team of 16 R&D members end of 2015 and now managing a team of 400+ people out of R&D, purchasing, Industrial Engineering, controlling, Quality, Plants.

Business with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems comprises high product variance with hard price competition. The Scaled Agile Supply Chain enables customer-oriented systems with a high re-use rate of platform solutions. It combines the development of base SW components by Agile Release Trains (ARTs), platform system solutions by Agile Solution Trains (SLTs) and a Customer Interface (CIT) with specific customer solutions. Since one ART delivers SW components to several SLTs, the presented approach does not incorporate ARTs within SLTs. ARTs and SLTs are organized like a Portfolio SAFe approach in separated development areas, whereas CIT is not agile. But a strong supplier relationship exists between ARTs, SLTs and CIT. Following the delivery traces mirrors a full SAFe solution starting with ARTs, SLTs up to CIT.

The presentation will focus on the status of Agile SPICE processes developed so far by the intacs working group. We will share experiences gained and lessons learned from piloting in assessments.

This talk gives an idea of how we performed an agile transition in one system engineering team at an automotive engineering partner. This team consists of 9 people all working together on a set of different projects for many different customers. For sure, not everybody is an expert in every topic and the customers themselves know some of the experts and request them. More obstacles as well as their solutions are presented and discussed during our talk and in the Q&A-Session at the end.

The VDA working group 'Agile Collaboration', with members from various OEMs and suppliers, published their work with the preliminary release of a VDA recommendation ('Yellow Print') in May 2020. The document not only describes possible cooperation models in theory, but also gives recommendations for collaboration, by referring to selected use cases.

This presentation will give you a brief introduction to the types of collaboration models in the document. You will also receive practical explanations for reading and understanding the use cases. This should help in everyday business to apply the recommendation efficiently and practically.

The context of the presentation is the development of a complex driving assistance system (Driver Monitoring System) in an ecosystem with several suppliers delivering to OEM that performs the product integration within the cockpit thanks to a dedicated agile entity. The main challenge was to define a suitable cooperation mode with the OEM that was both a customer but also co-developer of the product.

The following will be developed

1. What are the room for manoeuvre & enablers?
2. What are the constraints & hurdles?
3. How to trigger a dynamic & nurture it?

Automotive Industry has some unique challenges when it comes to Agile Transformation. Traditionally being strongly hardware- and requirements-driven – now moving towards million lines of code, while facing ambiguity of new regulations. In her presentation, Alena distinguishes between challenges related to foundational building blocks of the transformation and industry-specific challenges. You won’t be successful in mastering the industry-specific challenges, if you don’t create a strong foundation for your transformation journey.

Get some directly applicable ideas for our own agile transformation and learn how some automotive companies demonstrated exceptional AGILITY overnight during the current pandemic.

However even in Agile, the need to honor Automotive processes while at the same time producing quick feature turnarounds and high quality software can be overwhelming. We present a way to combine specification with formal languages, spec-driven development, and CI/CD to automatically check and translate low-level specifications into test and code, in such a way that any changes in the specification body can automatically be tested for influence on the whole body, and the code, dramatically lowering the workload for requirements engineering while at the same time guaranteeing high software quality and test coverage.