Software is an enabler for continuously delivering product innovations to customers. In the automotive domain, continuous software deployment is actively investigated to deliver increasingly capable features to existing fleets of vehicles. The distributed nature of vehicle software coupled with tight hardware integration and a potentially tremendous variability between vehicle individuals makes ensuring compatibility of updated software a significant challenge—both technically and managerially. Agile development processes address such challenges with short development cycles, informal inter-team communication, and tool-support for continuous integration and automated testing. This, however, normally assumes a single organisation with full control of their processes, while the automotive industry commonly forms larger multi-brand organisations to utilise economy of scale—a case not sufficiently investigated by current literature. In this paper we identify and describe organisational challenges with managing software dependencies in the context of a multi-brand automotive organisation. Through an exploratory, qualitative case[1]study we characterise software dependencies to link their technical nature with managerial challenges facing the organisations, which can support an organisation to formulate efficient management strategies.
”Mariano Corso Best Practical Implications Award”