Continuous Integration Beyond the Team: A Tooling Perspective on Challenges in the Automotive Industry

The practice of Continuous Integration (CI) has a big impact on how software is developed today. Shortening integration and feedback cycles promises to increase software quality, feature throughput, and customer satisfaction. Thus, it is not a surprise that companies try to embrace CI in domains where it is rather difficult to implement. In this paper we present our findings from two rounds of interviews with a car manufacturer on the use of tools in system engineering and how these tools would support wider adoption of CL Our findings suggest a complex tool landscape with immense requirements that are not easily fulfilled by existing tools; this holds also for tools that well support CI in other domains. From this notion, we further explore what makes the automotive domain challenging when it comes to CI (namely complexity of system and value chain). We hope that our findings will help address such challenges.