An Industrial Experience Report about Challenges from Continuous Monitoring, Improvement, and Deployment for Autonomous Driving Features

Using continuous development, deployment, and monitoring (CDDM) to understand and improve applications in a customer’s context is widely used for non-safety applications such as smartphone apps or web applications to enable rapid and innovative feature improvements. Having demonstrated its potential in such domains, it may have the potential to also improve the software development for automotive functions as some OEMs described on a high level in their financial company communiqués. However, the application of a CDDM strategy also faces challenges from a process adherence and documentation perspective as required by safety-related products such as autonomous driving systems (ADS) and guided by industry standards such as ISO-26262 [1] and ISO21448 [2]. There are publications on CDDM in safety-relevant contexts that focus on safety-critical functions on a rather generic level and thus, not specifically ADS or automotive, or that are concentrating only on software and hence, missing out the particular context of an automotive OEM: Well-established legacy processes and the need of their adaptations, and aspects originating from the role of being a system integrator for software/software, hardware/hardware, and hardware/software. In this paper, particular challenges from the automotive domain to better adopt CDDM are identified and discussed to shed light on research gaps to enhance CDDM, especially for the software development of safe ADS. The challenges are identified from today’s industrial well-established ways of working by conducting interviews with domain experts and complemented by a literature study.