![]() Actually, most Tesla owners wouldn’t be able to have a Tesla vehicle and so much innovation today if it wasn’t for this approach, and they generally understand that and appreciate being able to have the cars (potentially with bugs) rather than having to wait for a similar thoroughly vetted vehicle to come out years from now. Fortunately, the vehicles themselves are so much better than everything else on the road - and Tesla continues to deliver innovative, low-cost service solutions to fix its vehicles - that owners still rate Tesla at the top of the pack. Tesla’s phone key issues, panel gaps in early vehicles, road noise, seat improvements over time in most of its vehicles, issues with early Model X falcon-wing doors, Tesla Model S door handle issues, etc., etc., ad nauseam are all the symptoms of this strategy. The software is more than functional most of the time, but is expected to have bugs that rear their angry heads. The result is what we have seen in Tesla’s production vehicles - a total system that is effectively in a permanent beta state. The downside of this model - and current software development - is that, while development may happen at breakneck speeds, the vetting of the software in the millions of applicable scenarios still takes many weeks, months, and years. The downside of rapid development in the automotive industry Use of agile principles like “scrums” - or regular meetings designed to put structure around ingesting and vetting improvements - have helped Tesla to perfect its vehicles and bring innovations to market that would have taken more traditional automotive companies years if not decades to get into the hands of customers. It takes in feedback regularly, as if it thrives on new ideas, solving problems, continuous improvement and iteration. It iterates and rolls out improvements as they come. Tesla, unsurprisingly, operates like a software company. It is Tesla’s relentless pursuit of not just the best electric vehicle, but the pursuit of the best vehicle, period, that has defined its trajectory more than any other. It has instead applied the tenets of agile development to its automotive design and manufacturing processes, and in the process, it has revolutionized the industry. Tesla does not wait to roll out improvements. ![]() Tesla does not follow the long development cycles that have been the standard in the automotive industry for decades. The resulting process became known as “ agile development” and came to the Valley with its own set of “agile ninjas” that wielded their own sets of tools, standards, and language to bring stability and a new norm to the valley.Īt its core, it is this iterative software development methodology that has shaped the culture at Tesla. As the dust settled, entrepreneurs worked to redefine a set of software development best practices that would support a more standardized approach to short-cycle iterative development. This model worked for decades, but with the dot-com boom, a new generation of technologists and futurists began building solutions that could be stood up and torn down in a matter of weeks or months instead of years or decades using the new “world wide web” as a platform for communication, applications, and software development.Ĭoming out of the chaos of the dot-com boom was the dot-com bust that left the famed Northern California Silicon Valley in shambles. Enterprise tech teams were structured around these longer timelines and threw up their own gates to gather requirements, contract out the development, deploy the release, and validate solutions before handing them over to the service teams that would manage the solution for the rest of its lifetime. Software development used to be a long, drawn-out process, with teams of workers spending years if not decades to develop the next generation of the next big thing.
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