Thesis: Preface

I promised to post my thesis in a previous post. I hoped to have done so already last week, but things don’t always go according to plan. Here is at least the preface.

I don’t know if I should post a new chapter every day during Christmas, if I want to attract readers interested in development of software for embedded systems I guess this it’s not the best period.

This thesis is the result of my conviction that there was an untapped potential of improving present software development in the automotive domain, based on 10 years of industrial experience at Volvo Car Corporation.

The research project described in this thesis started with a goal of improving the architecture process and the management of software architectures in the automotive domain.
The goal evolved as the project progressed to use the right architecture as a means to improve the overall software development process in order to enable shorter leadtimes and to develop and release new features at a sustainable pace indefinitely.

I started the research project with the assumption that one of the main reasons for the automotive domain of not adopting best practices from other domains is that this domain has very different prerequisites compared to other domains, in the form of business practices, architectures and product properties. An assumption that I have completely reversed since I could find nothing in my empirical data supporting it when I compared with published cases form other domains.
The only reasons left that could explain this is a culture of “not invented here” in the automotive domain when we are looking at how software businesses, architectures, processes and teams play out in other domains.
Hopefully this thesis could be a step towards a better understanding that the automotive domain has more in common with other domains of software-intensive systems, than differences.