Connected Car

Digital Transformation in Software Development with Concept Reply – modern software systems for vehicle connectivity solutions.

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I declare that I have read and fully understood the Privacy Notice and I hereby express my consent to the processing of my personal data by Reply SpA for marketing purposes, in particular to receive promotional and commercial communications or information regarding company events or webinars, using automated contact means (e.g. SMS, MMS, fax, email and web applications) or traditional methods (e.g. phone calls and paper mail).

IOT TECHNOLOGY

The connected car can be defined as a car that can communicate with other systems, services or devices via a network. Today millions of connected vehicles can interact bidirectionally with any system over the internet. Bandwidth and costs for data transmission are no bottle necks anymore.

Therefore, it is quite essential to keep up with the cutting-edge technologies before the implementation turns to a legacy system. Concept Reply is specialized on IOT and has a great track record in the automotive industry – especially with developing vehicle connectivity solutions.

LEGACY SYSTEMS - KEEP THEM FLEXIBLE

The need to transform an IT system can have various reasons: Better performance to handle new requirements, no flexibility to connect and/or expand within the IT architecture, no cloud support/ connection possible or simply costs to react onto new market demands.

Scalability and security aspects are very often underestimated by sizing an IT system to deliver a specific use case. Additionally, what needs to be considered, is the changing way of developing software (agile methods) or how to write and test code. And probably combined with edge to cloud technologies.

Many more examples can be added. Those are the main problems of legacy systems and most of the time since the legacy systems are running on production environments, it is not an easy task to replace them.

Moving to the new technologies is an important and difficult challenge in multiple aspects. Especially in such a fast-moving market like the connected car, where OEM´s must plan years in advance and size IT systems according to future demands and customer requirements.

TECHNOLOGY

TECHNOLOGY

Cloud computing (e.g. AWS, Microsoft Azure) massively drives development of software in order to scale and reduce admin effort and costs. CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Jenkins, Bamboo) help to avoid manual deployments. Modern infrastructure is created on Containers (e.g. Docker, Podman) to run software independently and NoSQL databases are there to store and get data faster as the total amount of data is continuously rising.

There is also important trend in software development from structured programming languages to functional programming languages. Additionally, it is necessary to follow design patterns and clean code principles in the implementation as well as code reviews and test coverages.

METHODOLOGY

METHODOLOGY

In waterfall methodology, there are one purpose or separated teams, covering certain responsibilities e.g., data analysis, design, development, testing and quality insurance. They are dependent on each other as the nature of sequential huge steps of the waterfall methodology.

On the other hand, in agile methodologies, there are small, cross-functional, self-organized teams of size 6 to 9 people. The methodology itself is iterative and in the end of each iteration there is a deployable piece of product. It has many advantages over waterfall, such as continuous development, testing and deployment iterations of the software even from sequential huge phases as well as flexibility to adapt the requirements changes.

HUMAN

HUMAN

The people are playing the most important role in the process of transformation. However, people in their comfort zone, working in the same area for a long time, closed to learn new technologies, against automation due to possible loss of occupation, offensive for criticism (code review comments, etc.) make it more difficult and long running process for switching to the cutting-edge technologies.

STEP BY STEP TRANSITION EXAMPLE BY AN AUTOMOTIVE OEM


Concept Reply´s Connected Car project was about getting the messages from the vehicle, interpreting the data, storing the necessary information and providing the services to the end-users. There was a big transition on vehicle to server communication for the newly manufactured vehicles and that would massively increase the number of messages and data flowing to the system. It was obvious that the legacy system could not handle this amount of data. Then the transformation started.

Challenges at the beginning of the Connected Car project were to optimize the performance of many systems mainly caused by legacy infrastructure which could not handle the need of the demand. Moreover, the monolith 3-tier system architecture, messaging queues, hard to maintain software, not any more supported third-party tools and frameworks, no CI/CD pipelines, etc. make targets of the project even more challenging.

The added value behind all the steps that Concept Reply has taken is the possibility of being able to conduct Pair Programming sessions and knowledge transfer sessions and share the knowledge gained within the team.

SCRUM

CI/CD

ARCHITECTURE

COMMUNICATION

TECH

MONITORING

Concept Reply´s Connected Car project was about getting the messages from the vehicle, interpreting the data, storing the necessary information and providing the services to the end-users. There was a big transition on vehicle to server communication for the newly manufactured vehicles and that would massively increase the number of messages and data flowing to the system. It was obvious that the legacy system could not handle this amount of data. Then the transformation started.

Challenges at the beginning of the Connected Car project were to optimize the performance of many systems mainly caused by legacy infrastructure which could not handle the need of the demand. Moreover, the monolith 3-tier system architecture, messaging queues, hard to maintain software, not any more supported third-party tools and frameworks, no CI/CD pipelines, etc. make targets of the project even more challenging.

The added value behind all the steps that Concept Reply has taken is the possibility of being able to conduct Pair Programming sessions and knowledge transfer sessions and share the knowledge gained within the team.

SCRUM

Scrum training was necessary at any phase of the transformation so that every member of the team was aware of the processes. The focus was to train on AWS infrastructure, Scala programming language according to the new technology requirements based on the problems the team was facing. The knowledge was documented on confluence pages and agile communication possibilities across the teams were created. ×

CI/CD

CI/CD pipelines were created in order to get rid of manual deployments. Instead of standalone on-premises servers Concept Reply has switched to Kubernetes clusters to avoid downtimes during deployments. ×

ARCHITECTURE

The experts changed from monolith to microservice architecture in which all the components were independent of each other. A resilience pattern for the sake of robustness of the system was implemented. ×

COMMUNICATION

The legacy system was communicating via synchronous messages which were turned into asynchronous messaging in order to perform better and avoid of blockage issues. Also, the communication between the vehicle and the backend system was on HTTP protocol which were transformed to MQTT to provide much better performance. ×

TECHNOLOGY

Technologically, there was a switch from SOAP and REST to Graphql on API side, JEE to Node.js and/or Scala to increase the performance and to decrease the implementation time. ×

MONITORING

For real-time insights, various monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Kibana, etc. have been added for different systems. ×

CONCLUSION & ACHIEVEMENTS

The entire legacy system was transformed into a brand new, technologically, methodologically up to date system. By replacing the legacy system, customer satisfaction was increased. This was also expressed through high ratings of the mobile application. The end product resulted in a very robust and scalable system that ran securely and fast. Concept Reply's experts helped to ensure that the software teams were able to work efficiently and that all challenges were overcome smoothly due to the specialization in both legacy and cutting edge technologies.
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    Concept Reply

    Concept Reply is an IoT software developer specializing in the research, development and validation of innovative solutions and supports its customers in the automotive, manufacturing, smart infrastructure and other industries in all matters relating to the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. The goal is to offer end-to-end solutions along the entire value chain: from the definition of an IoT strategy, through testing and quality assurance, to the implementation of a concrete solution.