Driving up quality street [My Way: Automotive]

If there is one market where software really has to work, it is in automotive systems. Because of the sheer volume of vehicles on the run, software that drives engine management and braking systems gets many more hours of runtime than even complex avionics systems. The result is that bugs become painfully obvious pretty quickly in the field. Designing vehicles that include a fast-growing body of code, the manufacturers are pushing their subsystem designers to ensure they write quality code that will not break. That pressure is changing the way that automotive software specialists approach the job of writing code.