Searching for common ground: Existing literature on automotive agile software product lines

The digital transformation of the automotive industry has a signifi-cant impact on how development processes need to be organized in futurefi Dynamic market and technological environments require capabilities to react on changes and to learn fastfi Agile methods are a promising approach to address these needs but they are not tailored to the specific characteristics of the automotive domain like product line developmentfi Although, there have been efiorts to apply agile methods in the automotive domain for many years, significant and widespread adoptions have not yet taken placefi fie goal of this literature review is to gain an overview and a befier understanding of agile methods for embedded sofiware development in the automotive domain, especially with respect to product line developmentfi A mapping study was conducted to analyze the relation between agile sofiware development, embedded sofiware development in the automotive domain and sofiware product line developmentfi firee research questions were defined and 68 papers were evaluatedfi fie study shows that agile and product line development approaches tailored for the automotive domain are not yet fully explored in the literaturefi Especially, literature on the combination of agile and product line development is rarefi Most of the examined combinations are customizations of generic approaches or approaches stemming from other domainsfi Although, only few approaches for combining agile and sofiware product line development in the automotive domain were found, these findings were valuable for identifying research gaps and provide insights into how existing approaches can be combined, extended and tailored to suit the characteristics of the automotive domain.