Vehicle level continuous integration in the automotive industry

Abstract

Embedded systems are omnipresent in the modern world. This naturally includes the automobile industry, where electronic functions are becoming prevalent. In the automotive domain, embedded systems today are highly distributed systems and manufactured in great numbers and variance. To ensure correct functionality, systematic integration and testing on the system level is key. In software engineering, continuous integration has been used with great success. In the automotive industry though, system tests are still performed in a big-bang integration style, which makes tracing and fixing errors very expensive and time-consuming. Thus, I want to investigate whether and how continuous integration can be applied to the automotive industry on the system level. Doing so, I present an adapted process of Continuous Integration including methods for test case specification and selection. I will apply this process as a pilot project in a production environment at BMW and evaluate the effectiveness by gathering both qualitative and quantitative data. From the gained experience, I will derive possible improvements to the process for future implementations and requirements on test hardware used for Continuous Integration.