Test Lead Time And Cost Improvement Of Automotive Embedded Project - A New Perspective With Automation And CI/CD

In recent years, automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have been seeking cost-competitive, continuously upgradable, connected consumer electronics capabilities integrated into their Infotainment portfolio. Simultaneously, they are ambitious to achieve a release cycle ranging from half a year to a year. These expectations pose a major challenge for Infotainment Tier 1 vendors in terms of handling increased technical complexity while significantly reducing development, testing, and release time. This paper presents a proven approach to reducing test lead time using Automation and Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). The approach was applied to a European OEM customer with a highly complex technology landscape and shorter software build release iterations. By implementing a logical software build generation process, creating test infrastructure, and deploying an end-to-end test stage, the described work model achieved significant test lead time reduction (approximately 10%), and cost reduction (around 7%) compared to traditional Automation and CI/CD approaches. Furthermore, this concept can serve as a foundation for similar complex embedded products and projects, ensuring relevance to market demands in terms of release cycles and cost competitiveness.