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by rb2k_ 2518 days ago
Having worked at a German company (in Germany) that creates tooling for that kind of software development.

They had a huge smalltalk program that created embedded C code (AUTOSAR/MISRA if I remember correctly). Tests only ran manually and the coverage wasn't particularly high. I don't recall any automations that would have stopped you from saving new code that breaks tests to the smalltalk image.

Even though it 'worked', I wouldn't say this whole system excelled at what it did. Lots of manual QA.

So technically it worked, but it certainly was in poor shape from an automation perspective. It was my job as the mostly unsupervised intern to fix that. Granted, that was 10 years ago, but talking to some of my friends around Stuttgart, things move at a glacial pace :)
2 comments
guitarbill 2518 days ago
Seems to be true in the UK, too. I've heard bad things about e.g. Jaguar Land Rover. As another comment says, this is probably an issue with the embedded industry as a whole. There are great tech companies you can work for, which usually have a very high standard (ARM seems to be great).

Stuttgart/Baden-Württemberg is quite conservative. The real mystery for me was why their engineering pride of doing things correctly doesn't translate to the tech industry. I don't have experience in Berlin/Hamburg/Munich, but it'd be interesting to compare.

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hef19898 2518 days ago
My five cents because the basic design philosophies are quite different. And also industry inherent arrogance, especially within the so called premium manufacturers.

Bit the the opposite is true as well isn't it? You cannot treat automotive manufacturing like software development. I'd say the first company to successfully blend the two has a huge advantage.

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esyir 2517 days ago
Technically, even though it does to the fev sides of things, isn't this tesla?
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hef19898 2517 days ago
Not so sure about Tesla having figures out automotive mass production. Cannot comment on the software side of things, but I donhave the impression that Tesla is ahead of more traditional car makers there.
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rb2k_ 2511 days ago
They tend to be the first to e.g. introduce OTA updates, map updates over wifi/lte, ...

They are also one of the very few manufacturers that maintain their cars and even do somewhat major UI upgrades for years after the original release.

I'd say as much as they mess up, they are on the forefront when it comes to car manufacturers

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ozim 2518 days ago
It is not 10 years ago but something around that time I was working on automated tests for car equipment. Quite a lot of it was still semi-manual because you had to change some things with physical buttons that you would have in car, but voltage changes, and quite a lot of sensor inputs we had automated. Was quite easy because you could fake CAN connected devices.
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