Continuous Integration and Delivery Practices for Cyber-Physical Systems: An Interview-Based Study

Abstract

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) practices have shown several benefits for software development and operations, e.g., faster release cycles and early discovery of defects. For Cyber-Physical System (CPS) development, CI/CD can help achieving required goals, such as high dependability, yet it may be challenging to apply. This paper empirically investigates challenges, barriers, and their mitigation occurring when applying CI/CD practices to develop CPSs in 10 organizations working in 8 different domains. The study has been conducted through semi-structured interviews, by applying an open card sorting procedure together with a member-checking survey within the same organizations, and by validating the results through a further survey involving 55 professional developers. The study reveals several peculiarities in the application of CI/CD to CPSs. These include the need for (i) combining continuous and periodic builds, while balancing the use of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) and simulators; (ii) coping with difficulties in software deployment (iii) accounting for simulators and HiL differing in their behavior; and (vi) combining hardware/software expertise in the development team. Our findings open the road towards recommenders aimed at supporting the setting and evolution of CI/CD pipelines, as well as university curricula requiring interdisciplinarity, such as knowledge about hardware, software, and their interplay.

Experiences and challenges from developing cyber‐physical systems in industry‐academia collaboration

“…36 As a consequence, the CPSs require to be continuously updated and improved to meet these quality attributes. 21 Constantino et al 22 investigate a means of evaluating collaborative compatibility through examining co-changed files. They evaluate two strategies and through interviews conclude that they can predict suitable collaborators based on their previous history in development.…”

“…Therefore, it is important to consider new facets when setting up a CPS development process, particularly for continuous integration and delivery pipelines. 21 Models have been used extensively in the past for driving the development of complex systems at design time and as a reasoning layer for deployment, monitoring, and runtime adaptations at runtime. However, these approaches have remained mostly independent.…”

“…Besides, the deployment of large‐scale and heterogeneous interconnected CPS and its integration with the physical world increases the systems' complexity, demanding the management of non‐functional aspects of design architectures and dealing with specific requirements and constraints 36 . As a consequence, the CPSs require to be continuously updated and improved to meet these quality attributes 21 …”

“…While DevOps practices have been effective in improving software development for conventional systems, applying them to CPSs requires overcoming unique barriers and challenges, such as the need for suitable testing and simulation techniques, as well as the complexity introduced by the combination of diverse hardware devices and software. Therefore, it is important to consider new facets when setting up a CPS development process, particularly for continuous integration and delivery pipelines 21 …”

Increasing the Effectiveness of Development and Operation of Software for Cyber Physical Systems

“…The project results (Zampetti et al 2022), which were published show solution of problems comes out from theoretical model of CPS and is on the high theoretical level, but it does not consider that CPS that are used in practice have some structure and some operation rules, which are stipulated by legislative. Their fast change is not possible from economic and time reasons.…”