Software supply chain and distributed development
The automotive industry has a long history of using a supply chain, where suppliers provide components and hardware units that are finally assembled together to build a vehicle. With more software being used to support new advanced use cases, including automotive IoT use cases, the automotive supply chain also includes managing software in a so-called software supply chain.
While automotive organizations also need to consider securing the hardware supply chain, this topic is out of scope for this book. With the increased usage of software to enable automotive IoT use cases, we’ll focus our attention on the software supply chain.
Overview of the software supply chain
While there are changes happening to the supply chain in the automotive industry as a response to accommodate current trends of software-defined vehicles (SDVs), a generic view of a simplified supply chain is illustrated in Figure 8.1.