In the past, buying a car was a one-shot deal, but in recent years, with the rapid development of concepts such as smart manufacturing and new energy vehicles, personalized, customized, and intelligent new models are coming to consumers at double speed. You can buy products from major car companies equipped with smart cockpits and smart driving functions.
▲Intelligent cockpit
As we all know, new energy vehicles are not only "new" in energy, but also in the extreme changes in their production and manufacturing methods supported by intelligent manufacturing. However, the intelligent manufacturing of new energy vehicles is not an easy task. This revolution involves a comprehensive update of software, hardware and models. However, the products in this field have fast iterations, high precision, and difficult manufacturing processes. The situation is undoubtedly extremely severe.
Today's consumers not only pay close attention to the visible appearance and performance, but also have a more comprehensive consideration of the follow-up services after the purchase of a car. This undoubtedly poses a greater challenge to car companies: the degree of integration of cars in the process of chasing a sense of technology In order to maintain the long-term satisfaction of users, a lot of time and energy have to be spent on early research and development and follow-up services. New brands often pay attention to "soldiers are expensive and fast". How to balance consumers' expectations for products, services and delivery time has become an unavoidable problem for every brand and product.
Car companies need to continuously learn and improve their ability to quickly adapt to changes to speed up innovation and shorten production cycles, so as to ensure that new models can occupy the high ground of innovation when they enter the market. Agile development has become the choice of many car companies.
01. How agile can help car companies
Compared with the traditional waterfall method, agile is highly iterative, encourages small batch delivery, focuses on continuous value delivery and responds faster to changing market conditions, so it is more and more widely used in the automotive industry.
Product production can be facilitated through the following agile methods:
- Improve products and increase product quality through customer collaboration and faster feedback loops.
“(...) When we were developing the speech functions in the car, we found that we had installed functions that people didn’t use as expected. That was partly embarrassing and partly very educational for us. We saw that we had to change our development approach.”
- Anne Sandberg, Head of Continuous Improvement and Change, Volvo Product Creation
例句：While developing voice capabilities in cars, we found ourselves installing features that users weren't using as expected.
- Tackle complex issues and reduce time to market with cross-functional teams.
The introduction of a cross-functional team structure can effectively stimulate cooperation between team members with different expertise, reduce the number of handovers, enhance communication, and diverse teams can also maintain flexibility: members can share knowledge and solve problems faster, Focus on how to maximize the integration and utilization of available resources and shorten the time to market.
02. Agile project management and development in the R&D department
Driven by users' demand for advanced in-vehicle experience, automotive products are gradually changing from [traditional mechanical tools for transportation] to [a new generation of intelligent terminals with perception and decision-making capabilities]. Trends in industrial change. According to McKinsey's prediction, the content structure of global automotive software and hardware products is undergoing major changes, and it is expected that the proportion of software drivers will reach 30% in 2030.
In order to adapt to the new trend of industrial change, auto companies need to abandon highly structured working methods and instead support agile project management with a high focus on continuous improvement. By integrating feedback loops, agile teams can find ways to improve collaboratively, reduce project risk, and rapidly improve products to meet customer expectations.
In the process of automotive software development under the new trend, CI/CD is an agile attribute that cannot be ignored.
Different automotive ECUs provide different services and have different requirements for the underlying operating system. Under the background of the evolution of electronic and electrical system architecture from distributed to domain centralized, various functional modules are concentrated in a few domain controllers with powerful computing capabilities. At this time, applications with different security levels need to share the same computing platform, and the traditional physical security isolation is broken. How to use the agile method of CI/CD in the domain controller to help software development, testing and verification?
Note: According to the ISO 26262 standard, automotive instrumentation systems and infotainment systems belong to different security levels and have different processing priorities. The automotive instrument system is closely related to the power system, requiring high real-time performance, high reliability and strong security, and the QNX operating system is the main one; while the infotainment system mainly provides a control platform for human-computer interaction in the car, and pursues diversified applications And services, mainly based on Linux and Android.
▲Smart car hardware and software architecture
Computer systems with complete hardware functions can be simulated through full-digital simulation technology: users can access the target system at any time based on the virtualized operating environment of the embedded system built by Tianmu full-digital real-time simulation software SkyEye, without being limited by physical hardware, and quickly build a virtual environment. Hardware models and advance development, testing and verification of automotive software to achieve high-efficiency and high-quality software delivery.
The tight coupling between SkyEye-based virtual hardware and CI/CD workflow can be applied to the entire life cycle of automotive software development:
03. What should be paid attention to in the "Agile Road"
The automotive industry is very traditional, with strict product cycles and long supply chains, and has used a sequential approach to product development for the past 100 years - this will be one of the biggest challenges for OEMs on the road to agile .
Adopting Agile should not be a question of "if", but a question of "how". Before starting to restructure and transform the current way of working, OEMs should focus on assessing the current state of the company, identifying business challenges and finding the root causes of process inefficiencies, and setting priorities and goals for agile transformation accordingly-if not in the process of transformation If the goal is consistent, any result is doomed to be unsatisfactory.
Agile methods tend to be initiated from the bottom up, but support from company leaders is also critical for the full adoption of agile methods across the organization. Organizations with less experience in agile should proceed step by step, step by step, quickly achieve results through individual pilots and prove the benefits of the method, so as to play a demonstration effect. It is much easier to start a full agile transformation after reaching a certain level of maturity.
04. Summary
The application of agile methods can help car companies improve the capabilities of intelligent manufacturing of new energy vehicles, increase delivery speed while ensuring product quality, and achieve market leadership:
- In the same length of project life cycle, more frequent customer collaboration can build products that better meet market needs;
- Faster feedback loops and iterative product development methods will effectively improve product quality;
- Improve the ability of cross-team collaboration to deal with complex problems;
- Reduce time-to-market by reducing handoffs, fostering collaboration, and improving the overall operational capabilities of your team.
The automobile industry is being completely subverted under the influence of technological innovation. It is foreseeable that in the future, the intelligentization of automobiles will become the focus of competition among major automobile manufacturers, and software capabilities under agile methods will become the key to defining vehicle functions.
references
1、https://kanbanize.com/agile/industries/agile-automotive
2、https://t.cj.sina.com.cn/articles/view/7426890874/1baad5c7a001011r0j