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Technology Radar #27: Automotive SW perspective

As written before, I really like the regular updates provided by Thoughtworks in their Technology Radar. My focus is on the applicability of techniques, tools, platforms and languages for automotive software, with a further focus on embedded in-car software. Hence, I am ignoring pure web-development and machine learning/data analytics stuff which usually makes a huge portion of the whole report. Recently, its volume 27 has been published. Let’s have a look!

As usual, lets start with a dive in the “Technologies” sector and its “Adopt” perimeter. The first entry we can find is about “path-to-production mapping“. Its as familiar as it sounds – many of my readers will have heard about the Value Stream Mapping or similar process mapping approaches. Thoughtworks state by themselves that this one is so obvious, still they didnt cover it in their reports yet. Sometimes, the simple ideas are the powerful ones. I can confirm from my own experience that a value stream map laying out all the process steps and inefficiencies in an easy to digest manner is a good eye opener and can help to focus on the real problems instead of beating around the bush.

Something very interesting for all the operating systems and platform plans in Automotive is the notion of an “incremental developer platform“. The underlying observation that “teams shooting for too much of that platform vision too fast” is something I can confirm from own experience. Engineers love to develop sustainable platforms, but underestimate all the efforts required for it, and management with its impatience is further undermining platform plans. Following the book Team Topologies’ concept of a “thinnest viable platform” makes sense here. Not shooting too far in the first step, but also treating a platform product as an incremental endeavour.

Another one which strikes me is “observability in CI/CD pipelines“. With the increasing amount and complexity of CI/CD pipelines in one project, let alone a whole organization, many operational questions arise. And operations always benefit from clear data and overview. Recently, a then-student and now colleague and me designed and realized a tool which enables CI/CD monitoring for more than one repo, but for a graph of repos. I hope we can publish/open this project anytime soon.

In the platforms sector, Backstage entered the “adopt” perimeter. The project is actively developing forward, and indeed could be an interesting tool for building an internal sw engineering community.

Looking at the tools sector, I liked Hadolint for finding common issues in Dockerfiles.