| Follow up to this: The one thing that could cause a lot of problems for cars and software is Agile/Scrum. The projects that are being run in this, new for the industry way, are always late and people hate working on them. CEOs and other C suite people see the massively shorter lead times that software can offer and are getting greedy. They saved a year or more of time on a feature thanks to code and over the air and then they decide they want it made in 4 weeks, when 3 months would be prudent. There’s something about the intangibility of software that makes traditional automotive people’s brains break. Thankfully many rank and file engineers and PMs in OEMs are pushing back against Scrum etc so a more pragmatic layer of management will come up in the coming years. Sadly Agile/Scrum will cause some preventable issues in the meantime. Unlikely to be safety critical stuff due to the rounds of QA and safety council sign offs and gateways they need to go through. But less safety critical stuff may slip through. |
actually I see this break most managers' brains. In my experience it's been a constant pressuring to reduce scope such that the plans of the incompetent tend to be selected over those who know how to build great software with all the non-functional requirements in place (security, reliability, operability, modularity/flexibility etc) .