How do we ensure high software quality in our cars ? A never ending story
We, as a team in Volvo Cars, always aim to offer our customers a pleasant experience by providing intuitive and user-friendly products and services. This can be achieved by ensuring quality of our software. In this blog post, I will highlight the complex quality needs that has to be fulfilled during the development of a new car.
Development Process
During the development of a new car model, the most important things to consider are the features of the car. These features are a specific set of requirements provided to the external suppliers, and in-house developers as well.
To meet all requirements, there’re multiple tools to monitor product life cycle management. The tools not only achieve 100% traceability (in exceptional deviating requirements), but also monitor development status. The test outcomes are logged, so that we’ll know later which requirement was delivered, who delivered it, when, and how it was delivered.
It goes without saying each piece of software inside our car must be thoroughly tested first and then released. We ensure the quality of every code snippet by strictly following Volvo Binary Format. This means after passing all the quality gates, code must be formatted in a Volvo-specific way. This step ensures quality of the code, and also lessens the risk of hacking, thereby ensuring authenticity and integrity of the software.
When the delivered software has passed our multiple quality checks, we then need to configure the software with a set of variations, such as market applicability.
One of the in-house tools that we use for this process is Confighub. It accepts software files from all of the teams that deliver software, via a common continuous integration tool chain. Confighub is integrated with an internal application that ensures the coherency of all the source code. One of important functionalities of Confighub is to deliver the right set of software to appropriate test vehicles.
For example, India has left-hand traffic while people in Sweden drive on the right side of the road. Once the vehicle gets started, the signal must flow according to the right steering type. All these processes are governed by variant control maintained in the software downloaded into the car. All internal developers and suppliers can deliver the configuration of the hardware and software in an automated way via restful application programming interface calls and from user interfaces as well. All the requirements must adhere to the market specific legalities.
This is a crucial information to be synced to all the test organisations who are responsible for testing in a simulated environment. Without knowing the right set of artifacts, a test vehicle can never be tested.
There are many more innovative tools developed by our team. I will explain more in my next blog.
Enjoy reading…
