29 March 2013

PhD defence passed

The thesis defence went well and I passed all requirements for a PhD in computer science & engineering.
Th final report of the research project will be sent to VINNOVA on 30 April, with parts of it published in this blog. After that I will close this blog for further updates.

I will probably continue blogging after that in a new blog about software R&D and technology transformation in the embedded world, but with less focus on the automotive industry.

Ulrik

5 March 2013

Public thesis defence

Engineering software for mass-produced embedded systems
Ways-of-working, architecture and ecosystems for innovation
 
ULRIK EKLUND
 
Thesis to be defended in public on 28 march 10:00 at
Room EA, Hörsalsvägen 11, Chalmers, Göteborg
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
 
The thesis will be defended in English
The faculty opponent: Prof. Pasi Tyrväinen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
 
 
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY and UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG
CHALMERS TEKNISKA HÖGSKOLA och GÖTEBORGS UNIVERSITET
SE-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
Phone 031-772 1000

31 January 2013

Future car trends?

Here are some external links that might be of interest. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the trend predictions (lets say they don't fulfill the criteria for scientific papers), but they give input to forming personal opinions.

19 January 2013

Thesis chapter 12.3: Future work

Suggestions for future work are:
A successful transition to more autonomous development on a team level seem to depend on dedication and enthusiasm among developers, strong domain knowledge in the team(s), stable interfaces to other systems, and a good systems engineering foundation (in the form of a systems design or architecture). Further studies of sufficient prerequisites should be of great interest to practitioners and researchers alike.
Further research on how to mitigate issues with synchronisation and integration of many teams in large projects, where scaling of agile practices is just a special case. Of special interest is if the responsibility can be completely moved from the process to the architecture, creating a completely composable system where successful integration is assured just by following the architecture.
More studies with industrial validation of innovation experiment systems for embedded systems are needed.

18 January 2013

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.