Enhancing Automotive Head Units and Multimedia Systems

The client is a well-known American company focused on Automotive solutions. Its Automotive Multimedia systems and Head Units are widely used across different brands of cars all over the world.

Challenge

The client wanted to improve the overall quality of numerous embedded multimedia systems and Head Unit applications and build up an infrastructure for Continuous Integration approach to development. High team performance and agility were among the customer’s requirements.

Solution

Orion assembled a team to participate in the development, bug fixes and quality assurance activities of all product areas, including Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Testing. Following best-in-class architectural approaches and programming practices, the team became a trusted component of the customer’s R&D process.

The team adopted an integrated approach to implementing CI processes within the customer’s environment, including software, guidelines and highly skilled engineers supporting it. Upon the delivery of the software product, we also provided a team of engineers to support its deployment.

Our engineers designed, assembled and developed a test automation solution for Head Units and Multimedia systems that consisted of hardware and software components and would later become a part of the CI processes. This solution supports OCR and Computer Vision and can interact with Head Units and Multimedia systems in various ways and protocols, including CAN, serial bus and USB subsystem. We also developed a digital radio Head Unit module responsible for receiving and processing satellite data. In as little as six months, the team delivered the solution that significantly extended the Head Unit functionality, providing the driver with the information about fuel prices, nearest gas stations, weather conditions and much more. While working on the module, the team adopted the TDD (Test-Driven Development) approach for the first time. As of now, we remain the only supplier following the TDD in the customer’s projects.

In addition, the team developed an autonomous log-capturing solution from scratch that helps the customers’ distributed team collect traces and records from a various set of sources and share traces in Cloud in case of any issue.

As of 2019, our engineers continue to be a vital part of the customer’s team responsible for both hardware and software aspects of the test automation solution. Apart from R&D services, our experts provide the vendor with QA resources.

Impact

The solutions delivered by our engineers, in close cooperation with the customer, allowed the client to greatly speed-up their R&D processes, improve the quality of the products and hence increase customer satisfaction level.