Practicing Tailored Agile Framework for Automated Vehicle Software Development

The agile product development framework is widely employed in software production lines to reduce the time between market needs and product changes. The automotive industry, aiming to shorten time-to-market, is increasingly adopting agile methodologies across production cycles. Automated Vehicles (AVs) have more software components than Human-Driven Vehicles (HDVs). This motivates the effort to embrace the experiences obtained from agile practices of software products in the AV software sector. However, strict safety regulations oppose the rushing of software deployment in mission-critical systems such as AV applications, imposing challenges in adapting agile frameworks in the automotive industry. Many research studies and practices in the automotive industry have been conducted to address the mentioned challenges by filling the gaps and making trade-offs in a tailored approach considering organization structure and culture. As a case study, the present work introduces the agile framework implementation adopted as the software development procedure by one of the software development teams at ADASTEC Corp., an SAE level-4 automated public bus AV software provider. The contribution of the present work is sharing insights into the implemented tailored agile framework with the AV software development and safety-evaluation communities. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed implementation, the answers to two common questions are visualized using historical data from one year of using the framework within the case study team: (1) The relation between team maturity and completed workload, and (2) The impact of remote working versus in-office work on overall task completion.