Software developer Aptiv has published a white paper on testing processes for software-defined vehicles. The company notes that the sheer amount of software required by a modern vehicle has grown to tens of millions of lines of code, putting pressure on OEMs and suppliers to write, deploy and integrate code more quickly and efficiently. New testing methods are accelerating that process.
At the same time, software has graduated from enabling infotainment and engine functions to controlling new safety-critical features such as advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems, raising the stakes and vastly increasing the complexity of testing.
The paper highlights that traditionally, developers have written software for each hardware component and then integrated it with code for other parts of the vehicle. Testing of the integrated software has come late in the process, limiting the time for additional changes. Development of each component and vehicle platform has been a one-off process that starts over again for the next platform.
OEMs are now beginning to shift from this incremental, vertically integrated approach to more agile, iterative methods in which independent teams continuously write, integrate and test their own code. The result is that new architectures can be implemented faster.
Aptiv has been creating test methods to run on software as it is being developed. This allows testing to occur early and often, using automation, and adopting cloud platforms can improve all three stages of testing: software-in-the-loop (SIL), hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and vehicle-in-the-loop (VIL).
The white paper can be found here.