How to gain a quality overview in Complex large system: An exploratory case study of self-driving car project at Volvo Cars.

Abstract

Tracking of quality state of products during continuous development is important, especially if the development is carried out in a complex domain. Perhaps, a good quality overview would enable effective decision making of stakeholders on progress status, follow-up tasks, and improvement plan. In practice, while many stakeholders might be experts in their scope of working and might have a deep understanding of the quality state of their part of the product, reviewing the quality state of products at an integration level or end-to-end is quite challenging as most stakeholders undergo the same scope. Although visualizing verification activities (testing strategies) has been addressed in previous studies, there is a need to study how to deliver a quality overview at an abstraction level that would give a convenient way of presenting the quality state of products to every stakeholder. In this study, we explored this gap and reported on an empirical study that investigates challenges, opportunities of the current quality overview and possible elicitation of quality overview attributes in aspect with different scopes from the different stakeholders. In our exploratory case study, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 stakeholders. As a result, we have explored the chain of challenges in the foundation, life-cycle, and visualization of quality overview, together with valuable opportunities of certain quality overview tools which are existing in the case company, identified the convenient key performance indicators(KPIs) and how different stakeholders prefer to get their quality overview visualized. In the end, we proposed an alternative quality overview solution that appeared to be gone through an expert review evaluation in the case company.