Thesis chapter 12.2: Summary of contributions

The thesis provides the following contributions:

First, it presents a rich insight in the industrial development of embedded software through a number of industrial cases. The deep description is valuable both for researchers to better understand the relevance of potential research problems, and for professional practitioners to relate the context they are working in with other organisations.

Second, it presents a model of 5 approaches of industrial development of embedded software, ranging from integration-centric development focusing on. This model describes the approaches in more than one dimension, highlighting that differences between R&D approaches is not seen in e.g. just the process dimension, which is new.

Third, it defines a model for the interaction between individual development teams and the organisation as a whole, and based on this model a set of prescriptive measures supporting individual teams adopting agile development methods.

Fourth, it defines a novel reference architecture for composition of independently developed embedded software applications, suitable for using in an open software ecosystem. Open software ecosystems are not new, but no reference for implementation is published in literature.

Fifth, it defines an architecture for innovation experiment systems for embedded software. The concept of innovation experiment systems in this domain is completely new and the architecture is the first of its kind.

The artefacts developed above are all tried and evaluated in an industrial context, i.e. in a “real” project setting with professional practitioners.