Why do software-defined vehicles need faster-paced software
development? And how can this be achieved? Dr. Daniel Lueddecke,
Senior Software-Defined Vehicle Ecosystem Manager at Microsoft,
has the answers.
How do software-defined vehicles affect the development
and validation process?
In essence, it’s about shifting the center of the customer ex-
perience from hardware to software. This also increases cus-
tomer desire for regular software updates, which means that
development and validation processes are needed that allow
software to be developed much faster than before – without
compromising on quality.
What are the challenges to be overcome?
The validation process is usually added on at the end instead
of being thought of as an integral part of the development
process. In addition, the established validation processes
often rely on real hardware. All this leads to high development
costs and SOP postponements. Now, we all need to succeed
in moving the validation part forward significantly.
How important is open source?
The challenges can only be overcome through the interaction
of many parties. In collaboration with other companies, we
are pooling our contributions to software-defined vehicles in
the “Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle Working Group”. This
gives us the opportunity not only to come up with solutions
at specification level, but also to implement them directly to-
gether – we call this “code first”. Based on these open-source
components, commercial solutions can then be developed
and marketed.
Why are AVL and Microsoft working together in this area?
Hardware tests are very time-consuming and expensive. While
they cannot be eliminated entirely, it is necessary to reduce
them significantly, by shifting a large part of them to a virtual
environment. These virtualized test environments scale much
better. And it is even possible to test on virtualized hardware
that does not yet exist in reality. AVL’s expertise in testing and
validation is an excellent starting point for addressing the chal-
lenges in these areas. Combined with our expertise in design-
ing highly scalable and secure systems, we create immediate
value for our mutual customers.
We are currently working with AVL on developing new, scalable
DevOps solutions to perform and orchestrate software tests
as early as possible and fully automatically in virtualized envi-
ronments. Software versions, test cases, and Digital Twins of
the hardware are combined into individual configurations and
validated automatically in the cloud.
A look to the future …
Software-defined vehicles are already a reality. Until now,
however, there have usually been years between the deploy-
ment of new software versions in vehicles. This has meant
lengthy validation cycles. We need to break this pattern. We
need processes and tools that shift development and valida-
tion processes forward significantly. Shorter release cycles will
allow us to have shorter validation cycles and streamline the
entire process.
Interview with
Dr. Daniel Lueddecke
SPECIAL EDITION