Driving the pace of change

Engineers speak out on software's impact on the automotive industry in online survey.

In today's automotive industry, companies are faced with pressure in many forms-the pressure to lower cost, reduce cycle times, and ensure high quality-to name a few. The pressure to innovate is also greater than ever. New powertrain, safety, and infotainment technologies are all heavily dependent on software to function. Many of today's vehicles include more than 100 million lines of embedded software code. While offering incredible opportunities for innovation, software also increases complexity and risk.

As the amount and complexity of software in vehicles continue to grow, OEMs and suppliers are recognizing the importance of software engineering as a method to address the challenges of software development in the automotive industry. Change management and requirements management systems as well as version control and configuration management tools are some of the ways companies are addressing these challenges. Stand-alone and coupled suites of tools can also pose their own risks and challenges, such as a lack of traceability across entities in the repositories, limited reuse, process and information silos, and a lack of support for cross-domain product line management.