Presentations from Lindholmen Software Development Day 2010

All presentations form the Lindholmen Software Development Day 2010 are now up on the web site. I know we were filmed as well, but I don't know when they are finished editing.

ICES-INCOSE Architecting Seminar - presentations now on-line

The material from the ICES-INCOSE-seminar: Architecting Embedded Systems is now available.
There is also a summary of of the day, including the ending panel debate, which I personally found very interesting.

Trends and challenges in architecting embedded systems

Architecting is not even a proper word (I even heard someone at SPLC suggest all papers with architecting in the title should be rejected) , but is quite popular nevertheless. I think it has to do with Swedish allows you to construct a verb from just any noun, and still making sense....

I was in Stockholm to talk about architecting automotive software at an ICES-INCOSE seminar. You can find the slides from the other presenters (and mine in PDF) at the ICES homepage.
Staffan Persson is an architect from Scania and he presented a very interesting view on architecting in lean organisations (an introduction by Staffan can be found in Lean Magazine #5).

The finishing panel debate was interesting. I don't know if the notes from that will be published on the site, but I have a few reflections when thinking about it afterwards:

• One trait of a good architect is to freely move between different levels of abstraction. An architect needs to see the whole picture all the time, but he also needs to be able to dive down into details, "the devil is in the details".
• You can teach, and learn, fundamental knowledge for an architect, such expressing quality attributes, be familiar with architectural styles and patterns, know architecture platforms such as AUTOSAR or .NET, and being able to express designs in various views etc. But there are also another set of key skills that are very hard to teach, such as understanding the company culture (the common value ground), earn respect, know not only what technical parts that are affected by various decisions, but also who. So it would be difficult to move form one organisation to another an be productive as an architect.
• An architect needs to be comfortable with uncertainty. I know I am not, and this is one of my weaker points as an architect. And how do you assure other stakeholders that one should not make a decision now since we don't know enough?

Lindholmen software development day 2010

I held a presentation with the ambitious title The future of automotive software engineering at this years Lindholmen software development day.
The whole event was filmed so you can watch clips from me and the other presenters giving our talks when they are published (somewhere in the near future). Until then you can view my slides below, including the long list of references.

Project presentation

I presented my project at the yearly Volvo Industrial PhD program conference last week.

Seminar:Trends and challenges in architecting embedded systems

I will be talking at a seminar at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm 4 November: Trends and challenges in architecting embedded systems.
Besides Martin Törngren from KTH and Jörgen Hansson from Chalmers there will be speakers from Ericsson, Saab Aerospace, Semcon EIS, Scania, and myself...

Lindholmen Software Development Day 2010

Lindholmen Software Development Day is a yearly free get-together for local "software developers, managers, project managers and business developers" here at the north river shore in Göteborg. The theme for this year is

• Perspectives on and analyses of the changing market situation
• Software development philosophies supporting the changed situation
• Discipline Integration challenges and solutions, e.g., in H/W-S/W codesign
• Processes, Methods or tools to improve speed, efficiency, or quality
• Experience reports from new ways of working

I was asked by some people at Volvo Cars to present something relevant to us, and after some thought the topic of my talk would be "The future of automotive software engineering". Not pretentious at all...
Here is the outline I proposed. Any acceptance notification will come in August.

• General briefing on current and future trends in automotive software engineering
• Exponential increase in size, complexity, innovations, …
• Cycle times are dictated by what?
• Industry-wide ways to cope
• Standardisation
• Model-based development
• Architecture
• Soft issues
• Knowledge and maturity in the industry
• How to earn money?
• Some examples (from Sweden)

Project presentation

I gave a presentation of my project at the annual Volvo Industrial PhD conference:

I did get the question how my project would have looked like if I would have had a quantitative approach instead. I wished I had the Dilbert strip about numbers as a backup-slide.
Now I had to resort to a serious answer that for some research a qualitative approach will get you a better understanding than a quantitative...

Industrial research in student projects

I was asked to talk about my research in the course Research Methods and Technical Writing, at the IT University, together with a number of other researchers here at ITU.

My first thought was talking about case study research in the industry, but another speaker would talk about case studies so I dropped that idea. In the end I decided just to talk about doing students project in industry in general. I have supervised 5 thesis projects so I think I have som knowledge on the subject by now...

I have just finished the lecture and I'm not very satisfied with the outcome. I got very few questions and found it very hard to find any enthusiasm among the students. The original plan was that I would give the lecture a month ago, but various problems with finding a slot in my calendar postponed the lecture several times, so when I finally held the lecture most of the students had already selected topics for their projects.

I made a test of using LaTeX for making slides. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to share the resulting PDF in this blog. Suggestions are welcome...

Narcissism

This blog post will contain some heavy narcissism on my part...

I wrote an article named Experience of introducing reference architectures in the development of automotive electronic systems together with some colleagues. I also gave an appreciated talk at the second international workshop on Software engineering for automotive systems, which was one of the workshops at the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering in St. Louis, MO, USA (ICSE 2005).

ICSE is one of the most prestigious conferences on software engineering (the most prestigious according to some rankings) so the paper should have some academic merit. But it is almost impossible to find my paper in any academic database. The paper is not included in INSPEC, which is the biggest general database about engineering and science, event though INSPEC has articles from ICSE 2005. It is not found in IEEE Explore. The only databases I could find it is in ACM portal, besides Google Scholar.
So it is unlikely my paper will be referenced since nobody knows it exists...

You can find a full-text version of my paper here, courtesy the Mälardalen Research and Technology Centre at Mälardalen University.

Note: INSPEC is not free to use, the other databases should allow you to search, but not download material unless you have a subscription. But Google scholar is usually very good at finding a PDF somewhere on the net if you have the title and author of an article.

AUTOSAR course

I have just come back from the first part of the AUTOSAR course at the Royal Institute of Technology. Including the invited teachers, where I was one, we were 20 people attending, with about 2/3 being from academia and 1/3 from industry.

I think the course went well, but it was obvious that AUTOSAR is a new way of thinking about how to build ECU software compared to what people are used to. I hope that I helped not only in presenting my own stuff but also could answer the questions from the other participants.

My presentation is seen below, for material from the others some can be seen on the course homepage.

AUTOSAR lecture

I have been asked by prof. Martin Törngren if I could be a guest lecturer in a course about AUTOSAR at the Royal Institute of Technology.
Sounds really interesting, since I hope to also participate in other parts of the course besides my own lectures. But it is also challenging since the first occasion is already on 9-10 February and I have no material prepared. I need to discuss this with my supervisor before I make a commitment.

Software development takes over

I stumbled upon a news notice about how software development takes over the traditional product development in traditional Swedish industries such as Ericsson and Scania. Unfortunately it is in Swedish.
The article is published on E24, who claim they are the biggest business site in Scandinavia.

Much of what is stated in the article are things that I have discussed with colleagues and other researchers. But I think it is nice to have an "independent" source to refer to when I make a general statement about what type of business we are doing at Volvo Cars as a vehicle developer.

Feedback on my presentation

The two topics at in my presentation at the software architecture workshop that generated most questions (and discussions in the coffee break afterwards) were

1. The vertical versus horizontal development structure. This did not surprise me since I already knew that is an area of interest (see for example the article Software engineering for Automotive Systems: A Roadmap by A. Pretschner et al. in proceedings of ICSE 2007)
2. The handling of S/W variability, especially in an AUTOSAR context. This came as a surprise, and I certainly need to look into both what research and practical implementation have been done in this area. There has been some work on variability and AUTOSAR in the EAST-ADL2, but I am more interested in the technical implementation in the code than how to model variability.
   

ABB software Architecture Workshop

I visited the yearly ABB Software Architecture Workshop in Västerås on December 16. Very interesting with a good mix of people from industry and academia. I hope I'll get invited next year again.

One of the most interesting presentation, at least for me also working in automotive, was from Scania and how they worked with product line architectures. The approach they had to working with electrical architectures was quite different from Volvo Cars even though we are both working in the automotive sector. This only shows how important the business decisions and company culture are and the necessity to adapt the architecture in order for it to be successful in a company. Since Scania already had a product line approach for the mechanical parts of a truck it was very easy for them to have a similar approach in the electrical system

I held a short presentation about standardised software architecture in the automotive industry. It generated a lot of questions and discussions among the audience which I take as a good sign that my research will be of interest to others.
Here is my presentation available through Google documents:

Project Presentation

I held a presentation about my research project at the Annual Volvo Industrial PhD Program (VIPP) Conference in October 2008. If it seems very fuzzy with no results it is because I had just begun my research, and I expect to have a much more crisp definition of my research questions in 2009.