The great pace race: Speed in automotive software development

Sustainability concerns, shifting consumer preferences, and continuously evolving automotive technology are reshaping the sector. Companies that can’t keep up will have a hard time surviving, let alone growing. To stay ahead of the curve, forward-thinking businesses are aiming to create agile environments where software and product innovation can flourish.

The ability to offer the latest features, or even to be first to offer them, is hypercompetitive in the automotive industry. Most leading automotive businesses work on many of the same innovations in parallel in a race to offer them to the market first.

With a great deal of unexplored potential, software for vehicles represents an extremely promising prospect for automotive companies to differentiate themselves and gain an edge. However, bringing together the right expertise, infrastructure, and technology in this growing field can be a serious obstacle. Having said that, the rewards for getting it right will be significant and long lasting.

The following figures shows the major uses of software in vehicles.

45% of automotive software professionals say that they are struggling to test effectively. They report that testing and software validation are too time consuming.

23% say they aren’t testing early enough in development, so they are finding bugs too late.

(Source: Automotive IQ, 2021)

OEMs looking for faster time to market, reduced costs, and higher output quality from their in-house software teams are facing steep learning curves for their digital initiatives. A key stumbling block is the amount of time and resources spent on inefficient testing methods.

Cloud computing solutions can help by allowing the creation of virtual test environments without the need to develop, maintain, and scale physical hardware. This means that they can "‘fail fast," reducing testing cycle times and allowing continuous development even after product release.

It almost goes without saying that cloud enhances collaboration between global teams. It allows seamless, simultaneous development, further increasing the deployment speed of new software products and features.

50-80% - the reduction in deployment times for critical application components in the cloud

(Source: Automotive World, 2021)

NetApp^® solutions enable a consistent, seamless experience across your multicloud environment. This means that your developers can iterate faster, with automated, on-demand provisioning; and they can accelerate app development while streamlining the pipeline with cloud-native DevOps technologies.

Our solutions help DevOps teams deliver and deploy code more rapidly and to test and release software more reliably, enabling organizations to be more responsive and to rapidly scale innovation. It’s not about how fast you develop—it’s about how well you develop fast.

How do we know? We ourselves underwent a complete transition from a core-centered approach to become a hybrid cloud-centric software company, vastly Improving our speed to market and the efficiency of our analytics and product release cycles. Explore the NetApp on NetApp journey. You can also learn how we helped Bosch take the same steps.

Read about some of the DevOps solutions we offer.

This is part three in a four-part series on software development in the automotive industry. Check out part one and part two. 

If you’re interested in speeding up your software development, get in touch with a NetApp specialists at automotive@netapp.com. Also check out our automotive industry webpage.