The phrase “software is eating the world” is ubiquitous across all industries, and the automotive sector is no different.
Software is the main technology driving innovation in cars. Millions of lines of code underpin everything from our vehicle’s navigation systems and engine control to its power steering and airbag deployment. We’re basically driving mobile computers.
On the back of this incredible growth is the rise of automotive software tools. Now, the automotive supply chain is bigger and more complicated never ever. There are now multiple software vendors and hundreds of teams and tools trying to work together to build a single vehicle. It’s chaos, and it’s dangerous.
All these vendors and teams are trying to build software faster to stay ahead of the competition, investing in various combinations of transformational practices, from DevOps to Agile to SAFe to Nexus, to accelerate their software delivery. Yet collaboration remains a huge bugbear because they’re all operating in different tools.
These tools don’t naturally integrate, meaning there’s no single fundamental communication channel, making accurate real-time visibility and traceability nearly impossible. Worse, this lack of a holistic view across the supply chain means they don’t even know if they’re building the right product.
Delivering the wrong product in the automotive sector has fatal consequences. To safeguard against defective software, there are strict compliance issues in place across automotive software development (just as there is for the all non-software components).
But how do you ensure compliance when you have no traceability across the workflow? How do you know the right code is being tested? You need to ensure your heavyweight Application Lifecycle Management tools for managing product lines, such as codeBeamer ALM, is connected to your testing tools, as well as all other tools/teams across the software supply chain. Only then do you have your single communication/collaboration channel.
To learn more, watch the below webinar on ‘How to optimize supply chain collaboration: the road to a unified automotive value stream’:
Slides for this webinar can be viewed here.
