Architecting automotive product lines: Industrial practice

Archetypical Approaches of Fast Software Development and Slow Embedded Projects

“…Despite the limitations it is still possible to draw some general qualitative conclusions: The common way of working is to follow a sequential order of activities, which is characterised as a V-model [19] or as a stage-gate process [6], [20]. Some papers describe cases of agile development, either for a system as a whole [11] or by individual teams within the organisation [20].…”

“…Some organisations utilise a product line architecture to enable tailoring of the system to a particular customer [23], [24]. An important architectural issue is the integration of modules or sub-systems to a working whole [6], [12], [18], [25].…”

“…These criteria were applied in two rounds, the first round by just reading the abstracts, which left 53 papers. The second round evaluated the full papers, and this resulted in 23 papers, of which the authors were involved in 4 papers [6], [11]- [13].…”

“…Our insider knowledge allowed us to identify when multiple papers described the same case, e.g. developing a new car year model on an existing platform at Volvo Car Corporation [6], [15]- [17], or the continuous evolution of a heavy vehicle product line [6], [18].…”

“…This can be considered the standard practice at which MPES software is developed, with six cases clearly falling into this category (described in papers [6], [13], [15]- [17], [19], [21], [27], [28]). An additional twelve cases (in papers [22], [23], [25], [29]- [31]) fall either into this category or category D.…”