Industry urgently needs to strengthen its software expertise. This applies especially to traditional machine engineering companies. Companies that fail to do this risk opening up their markets to software companies that possess the required hardware expertise and threatening their own existence. In an effort to highlight this issue, fortiss has published a white paper titled "Code Excellence - Challenges and Opportunities for Bavaria". The authors' findings are applicable to any company that wants to ensure its future capabilities are on a solid footing.
In this new publication from fortiss, the authors outline the underlying challenges involved in software engineering. Relying on the results of an online survey, they discuss the difficulties that companies are facing and provide insights into the global development of techniques and technologies for various application scenarios using publicly-available market data.
The authors draw a comparison to Bavarian-wide trends, point out issues that require the flexibility to adapt and highlight the unique selling points that Bavarian companies offer. The paper concludes by outlining the concrete opportunities presented by this trend and offers recommendations for specific software engineering topics and developments that companies could potentially profit from, including the corresponding expertise they need to develop.
Key findings at a glance
- Companies often lack a development process and an understanding of the benefits of quality software and clean software architectures, especially at the management level. Changes within the corporate culture are also needed.
- Even the software product requirements represent a difficult challenge. Although companies often rely on agile methods and techniques for the documentation, in most cases they fail to adequately utilize or implement them.
- Testing: Most companies lack testing guidelines for their software and use undefined requirements as a basis for carrying out the tests.
- Software expertise: Companies often lack training and education measures and simple methods for the internal transfer of knowledge.
- While there is growing interest in fields such as agile methods and DevOps, technologies such as C++, Matlab and Simulink are nevertheless the most popular.
- From a global standpoint, the greatest interest is in the areas of artificial intelligence, big data, distributed ledgers and web technologies (JavaScript, Serverless). There is also a clear worldwide trend toward open-source software in these areas.
- Combining embedded systems and modern trends. The biggest challenge lies on the one hand in the integration of agile methods while ensuring dependable and safe quality, and on the other in the combination of modern technologies and interfaces.
The White Paper can be downloaded here (in German)
Further information about our Center for Code Excellence can be found here.