Innovation and software R&D have become such great challenges within the automotive industry; along with the imperative for electronic systems and embedded software to comply with standards. ISO 26262 and ASPICE are two important standards related to automotive safety and reliability. It’s a must to prove that your new software solutions meet the standards’ requirements. Let’s see how Tuleap help you achieve compliance, optimizing your development projects and managing your quality processes.
Sommaire
- Cyber-physical systems and compliance obligations: the great automotive challenges
- The need of an Agile ALM to make innovation and ISO 26262 – ASPICE compliance easier
- Requirement management, Planning, QA: the key features to achieve ISO 26262-ASPICE compliance
- ISO 26262 – ASPICE: 2 complementary quality approaches
Cyber-physical systems and compliance obligations: two major automotive challenges
You know it better than anyone else: the automotive industry is nowadays facing major challenges related to software development and standards compliance. Automotive manufacturers have to invest in Research and Development to take up these challenges and ensure both the safety and the performance of the delivered vehicles. At the same time, they have to follow the latest trends and technology advances, as well as to rapidly adapt to changes to remain competitive on an ever-changing market.
The sooner the better, here’s the challenges to take up:
Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV)
- Integration of complex software into vehicles to provide advanced capabilities,
- Development of highly reliable and secure software to ensure both passengers’ and systems’ safety,
- Management of software updates in real time to guarantee the vehicle’s optimal performance.
Autonomous cars
- Development of self-driving car software that is able to take complex decisions in real time,
- Compliance to strict safety standards to minimize accident risks and ensure vehicle occupants protection,
- Integration of advanced sensors, such as radars and cameras, to enable a more precise perception of the surrounding environment.
Connectivity and cyber-security
- Integration of connectivity into vehicles to provide features such as real-time navigation and remote software updates,
- Cyber-security strengthening to protect vehicles against cyber-attacks and malicious intrusions,
- Compliance to regulatory standards in terms of data protection and users’ private life.
Infotainment and user experience
- Development of intuitive and user-friendly infotainment systems to improve users’ driving experience,
- Integration of advanced technologies such as voice recognition and virtual assistants to favor a natural, human-like, interaction with the vehicle,
- Compliance to access standards to make sure that all the functions available are accessible to everyone, including to people with disabilities.
Validation and regulatory compliance
- In-depth tests of new automotive application solutions to ensure they meet safety and performance requirements,
- Compliance to national and international standards related to road safety and polluting emissions,
- Collaboration with Notifies Bodies to guarantee that the new technologies comply with the standards in force.
The need of an Agile ALM to make innovation and ISO 26262-ASPICE compliance easier
Improved collaboration for automotive stakeholders
Equipments manufacturers, car manufacturers and service providers… the automotive sector players are numerous and complementary. An Agile solution of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) such as Tuleap, can definitely give you a competitive edge, especially when it comes to be able to adapt to the changing needs, expectations and requirements of the market. Such a solution becomes a common reference point for teams, providers and partners. It makes collaboration easy and allows to have an end-to-end traceability.
Tuleap is an all-in-one solution that provides you with 100% overall visibility on your products, down to the actual development of projects. The great advantage here, is that you have an integrated solution which is highly customizable depending on your activity and team process.
Prove developments traceability
Another important aspect, is the fact of having an end-to-end traceability considering that everyone is working on the same platform. This means that anything is interconnected to enable you to more easily find the information and prove what has been done: from the very first requirement to the bug pointed by the dev (test) team or users.
Finally, end-to-end traceability within one single platform makes audits preparation and processes easier, faster.
Requirement management, Planning, QA: the key features to achieve ISO 26262-ASPICE compliance
Let’s now focus on the key features of Tuleap for the optimization of both your developments and the quality assurance of your software projects for automotive standard compliance purposes.
Hybrid and Agile project management
Tuleap provides a large set of agile tools to enable each team involved into the automotive project to follow their way of working while aiming to meet a shared goal.
For instance, the Product Tuleap Roadmap makes it possible to share the common goal by showing the expected product development through time. From an Agile point of view, the roadmap reflects an incremental plan that’s open to change, rather than a static planning; which turns out to be a really useful tool to share the product vision – the actual “meaning” of the project – among teams.
Within the Agile Dashboard, you can also find the following items:
- Backlog planning: to gather all the requirements and features to be developed, making a difference – thanks to color codes – between those generated by user feedback and requests and those created from a requirement.
- Milestones: one or more milestones to set up depending on your needs (i.e. releases, automotive product software, etc.) as to consequently plan features development.
- Tuleap Kanban Dashboard: there is also an interactive cardwall to better follow any task’s progress until the finish line, and subsequently pass to the validation stage.
Requirements Baseline
With Tuleap, you can create as many requirements baselines as you want. A baseline is a static item created at a given moment, such as a snapshot, but it’s definitely possible to go back in time and have full traceability of the elements it contains. It is also possible to filter the pieces of information you need, based on different criteria such as trackers.
Moreover, you can generate multiple baselines to be compared over time, as to better monitor and understand potential changes: for instance added, modified or even deleted artifacts. (« Shot 2 vs Shot 1 », on the graph here on the left).
Automotive tests management and validation
Tuleap enables you to set up an early test management strategy with tests plans including both automated and manual tests.
Following the progressive specification of your automotive software products requirements, you can directly plan both your QA tests, with very specific criteria, and tasks; this, as to easier follow your test coverage for each and every specified requirement. In other words, Tuleap helps you define, deploy and continuously improve your Software Quality Assurance plan (SQA).
Thanks to Tuleap Test Management (TTM), you can create as many test campaign as you wish, monitor them at each stage and immediately detect potential faults to quickly fix them. Finally, validate your software product(s) more easily, faster.
At the same time, TTM makes it possible for you to put in place and ensure end-to-end traceability: get back the information you need for compliance audits purposes at any moment, in a few clicks.
Documents management
Concerning audits, proving your developments and software products quality is a sine qua non criterion to obtain your automotive standards compliance certification.
Within Tuleap, you can create as much workspaces as you need while centralizing all the information about each automotive product. You can also secure data thanks to an advanced authentication system and the attribution of specific permission access to the different workspaces and/or documents.
Plus, Tuleap document management feature provides:
- an integrated MediaWiki to make teams collaboration and document sharing easy,
- the possibility to activate the OnlyOffice integration – the open source alternative to Microsoft Office 365 – to read, modify and create collaborative documents (.xlsx, .pptx, .docx, .pdf, etc),
- automated document generation, including for traceability matrix, to ease the editing of one or multiple detailed technical records – key for compliance audits.
ISO 26262 – ASPICE : 2 complementary quality approaches
- ISO 26262 is an international standard related to the functional safety of electrical and electronic systems embedded into road vehicles. It aims at ensuring the systems functional safety throughout their entire lifecycle.
- ASPICE, or Automotive SPICE, is a process improvement model within the automotive industry for the development of embedded systems. It aims at enhancing the quality and sophistication of software and embedded systems development processes.
On the one hand, ISO 26262 has a safety-based approach to meet specific requirements and challenges. On the other hand, ASPICE comes with a process-bases approach to complement it. It is crucial to make sure that your products meet the market needs, all the more within a context where more and more features are coming on stream rapidly.
The idea then is to simultaneously deal with the two quality approaches of ISO 26262 and ASPICE: you’ll have features to be monitored as to make sure to comply with customers expectations, while following the different processes to finally guarantee that all the safety challenges have been met, too. In other words, you’ll develop safely and usefully, hence avoiding a mismatch between the product and the market as well as the standards.