Barriers and Enablers for Shortening Software Development Lead-Time in Mechatronics Organizations: A Case Study

The automotive industry adopts various approaches to reduce the production lead time in order to be competitive on the market. Due to the increasing amount of in-house software development, this industry gets new opportunities to decrease the software development lead-time. This can have a significant impact on decreasing time to market and fewer resources spent in projects. In this paper we present a study of software development areas where we perceived barriers for fast development and where we have identified enablers to overcome these barriers. We conducted a case study at one of the vehicle manufacturers in Sweden using structured interviews. Our results show that there are 21 barriers and 21 corresponding enablers spread over almost all phases of software development