Scaling Agile Mechatronics: An Industrial Case Study

The automotive industry is currently in a state of rapid change. The traditional mechanical industry has, forced by electronic revolution and global threats of climate change, transformed into a computerized electromechanical industry. A hybrid or electric car of 2013 can have, in the order of 100 electronic control units, running gigabytes of code, working together in a complex network within the car as well as being connected to networks in the world outside. This exponential increase of software has posed new challenges for the R&D organizations. In many cases the commonly used method of requirement engineering towards external suppliers in a waterfall process has shown to be unmanageable. Part of the solution has been to introduce more in-house software development and the new standardized platform for embedded software, AUTOSAR.