From code to car, in a single experience

The automotive industry is in the middle of its third revolution through vehicle software innovation and transformation. Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) are set to transform transportation, allowing users to personalize and improve their in-vehicle experience throughout the lifetime of their car. But with this power comes complexity. To ensure these vehicles are safe, reliable and ready for the road, a robust testing toolchain is the key to unlocking the full potential of SDVs. Today, automotive software developers depend on complex hardware setups to develop, test and deploy new functionality. Existing developer tools are fragmented and vendor specific, which leads automakers to build and maintain highly customized development environments.

To address this, we are excited to announce Ready CQuence Loop, a cloud-native development and testing solution offered as a fully managed service that accelerates development cycles, decreases cost for development infrastructure and enables new features and experiences to be rolled out to users faster than ever.

Introducing Ready CQuence Loop

Ready CQuence Loop is an SDV development toolchain offered by HARMAN Automotive. It is a single tool for code development, building, testing and validating new functionality with simulation tools. It encompasses an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), virtualized testing environments, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, as well as simulation tools. It offers cloud-to-edge parity on the instruction set architecture level, in a zero-setup browser-based environment, using scalable cloud infrastructure. Ready CQuence Loop offers a developer friendly interface, customizable according to project needs and easy to collaborate across teams, increasing developer productivity. 


Ready CQuence Loop offers advanced developer experiences in a simple and intuitive interface, reducing the learning curve for software developers and significantly decreasing the cost of ownership compared to traditional development environments. New team members onboarding onto the software development can happen 70% faster, thanks to Ready CQuence Loop. Traditionally, it takes 6-12 hours to set up a new cockpit hardware and make it ready for use, but with Ready CQuence Loop, users can be onboarded and start using virtual targets in as little as 30 minutes. It also integrates with existing code repositories and CI/CD pipelines to enable an end-to-end development and deployment environment.


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Ready CQuence Loop offers in-browser development capabilities to allow developers to kick-start their work within seconds.


Ready CQuence Loop is built on top of Arm Virtual Hardware (AVH), enabling virtual testing at parity with final hardware. Developers no longer need to first build code on desktop emulators running on x86 devices and then rebuild their code for ARM chipsets for final hardware validation. Ready CQuence Loop virtual ARM instances support Instruction Set Architecture parity (ISA) and Central Processing Unit (CPU) Architecture Parity to make it easy to develop and deploy anywhere. 


The cockpit system, built on a high-performance compute platform, supports multiple virtual machines including both generic Android OS and safety-critical OS like real-time Linux. Ready CQuence Loop offers VirtIO support natively, a well-established interface, to run the Android as guest OS across the different hardware platforms in multi-OS Virtual Machine (VM).



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​The virtual cockpit test bed of Ready CQuence Loop allows automotive software developers to test and experience their applications with minimal effort directly on their browser.


To complement cloud-based virtual testing, Ready CQuence Loop also supports Automotive Device Farm. It allows developers to connect to device farm hardware set-ups management either by automakers, by third-party vendors, or by HARMAN. Developers can easily reserve, schedule tests and connect to real target devices while staying in the same developer experience.



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The Ready CQuence Loop Device Farm capabilities allow developers to schedule time on a real target hardware to conduct tests the same way they do on virtual cockpit


To boost the productivity of software development teams, Ready CQuence Loop also offers testing automation. Developers can create, manage, schedule and execute automated test cases and then download and share the test results with their teams. With such tools, development teams can run extensive nightly regression tests without worrying about hardware availability.


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Accelerating testing by providing ways of design and execute automated test cases


With Ready CQuence Loop, we open a new chapter where automotive companies and their partners can bring their solutions into a unified toolchain experience. These solutions include additional embedded software stacks and operating systems, additional tools for simulation and testing, or third-party development environments.​

Empowering your SDV journey

“HARMAN is uniquely positioned to lead the SDV revolution. We offer automakers end-to-end solutions to develop, test, deploy and monetize digital content and car features. To empower you on the SDV journey, the new Ready CQuence Loop product will be focused on the developer experience. Once the new code is ready to be deployed, automotive companies can take advantage of HARMAN Over-the-Air Software Updates. Automakers simply create a vehicle update campaign, target vehicles, and distribute the new functionality.” - Heiko Huettel, Vice President of Software Products, HARMAN.


To summarize, Ready CQuence Loop empowers developers to seamlessly bring new functionality from idea to the vehicle, by simplifying the end-to-end development cycle with modern, scalable development infrastructure. 


Click here ​to read the PR announcement.

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Daniel Lueddeke

Senior Director, Product Management Toolchain​ at HARMAN International​​

Connect with the Author: LinkedIn ​​