Perforce Software recently released the results of its annual State of Automotive Software Development survey, targeting current practices and emerging trends in the automotive industry. The survey covers a range of topics, including top challenges, market conditions, security, standards-compliant software, coding standards, programming languages and software tools. It also addresses the impact of electric vehicles (EVs) and autonomous, semi-autonomous and connected vehicles on developers and how AI and machine learning (ML) are impacting design.
A key finding reveals that quality and security have outpaced safety as leading concerns. The top three software development concerns for automotive developers are quality (29%), security (25%) and safety (21%). Quality was the top concern in the Asia-Pacific region, while security was the leading concern for respondents in all other regions. In 2023, safety was the top concern, followed by security and quality.
(Source: Adobe Stock)
“Embedded security concerns continue to rise as the need to protect automotive electronic systems, communication networks and software grows,” said Perforce product evangelist Steve Howard, in a statement. “OEMs and their supply chain partners want to prevent costly and malicious attacks, unauthorized access, or manipulation to automotive systems, and ensuring their code is secure is the first step to mitigating those incidents.”
The Perforce survey, conducted in partnership with Automotive IQ and the Eclipse Foundation, surveyed nearly 600 automotive development professionals across the globe, including software development, engineering, strategy, project management and architecture. The 2024 survey was expanded to include more respondents from the Asia-Pacific region. Asia now represents the majority of respondents (39%), followed by Europe/UK (29%) and North America (21%).
The survey reveals the importance of market conditions in automotive software development. The global economy continues to be the top concern (35%), followed by supply chain challenges (26%) and a shift to a remote/hybrid workforce and/or outsourcing/opening remote locations globally (21%). This means maintaining industry competitiveness and maximizing existing resources, among other strategies, will be important in 2024, Perforce said.
Electric and connected vehicle development also has an impact on development teams. Most teams are now working on electric components (84%) and connectivity components (79%) to some degree. Of those respondents working on electric components, 51% said they are working extensively on EVs, an increase of 6% versus last year; 33% reported EVs somewhat impacting design and development, down from 45% last year, and respondents who are not at all working on EVs increased from 10% to 16%.
In addition, as hardware components are being replaced by software in EVs, it is critical that software is compliant with functional safety and security standards, Perforce said. The biggest concerns for developers are complying with regulations to ensure safety (40%), security and avoiding cyberattacks (26%), time to market and meeting deadlines (16%) and keeping development costs under control (19%).
For autonomous vehicle design, 42% of respondents reported working on some autonomous components and 33% are extensively focused on designing a fully autonomous vehicle. Twenty-five percent are not working on autonomous vehicles.
The automotive development focus for EVs includes the powertrain, EV charging and hybrid electric control systems. For non-EVs, the key focus areas include chassis and safety, ECUs/ECMs and the powertrain.
Another key finding shows that 82% of respondents use a coding standard to ensure safe, secure and reliable code, with 67% using a static code analysis tool to aid in compliance and 26% using a SAST tool to ensure secure software. In addition, 62% are using MISRA, an increase of 20% over last year.
The survey also finds that the biggest challenge in managing hardware, software and code assets is cross-team (hardware and software) collaboration (29%, up 5% from last year). This is followed by integration with engineering tools (24%, down from 30%) and teams working from distributed locations (21%, down from 25%).
Although the survey finds that there was an overall decrease in using AI and ML for product design and development, 43% of respondents said there were still using AI/ML somewhat for development and 32% are using it extensively to drive innovation. Developers who are not using AI/ML at all increased to 25% from 18% last year.
Most developers are using AI/ML in automotive software development for ADAS (68%), followed by in-vehicle infotainment (40%) and LiDAR (33%).
For the complete results, click here to download a copy of the report.
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