John Sanderson, President and CEO of Siemens VDO in North America is quoted in April’s AutoTechnology magazine as saying “[Software] truly is a product, and it needs to be managed as a product, from a business standpoint and an engineering standpoint.”

In the past automotive software was considered as something that could just be tacked on to the development of the part on which it ran. However, with the amount of software in a car increasing from thousands to millions of lines of code and software predicted to make up around 13% of the cost of a car by 2010 this is no longer possible.

Moreover, the automotive domain isn’t unique. Systems developers in other embedded domains are also increasingly recognising that software is vital to their future business strategy and are placing more focus on enhancing or building a software development capacity as a consequence.