Telematics is the combination of information processing and telecommunications technology, which allows information to be exchanged between a vehicle and a central system. This data exhaust can play a vital role to enhance the vehicle’s efficiency, safety, and functionality. For this reason, telematics is already a key technology in multiple industries including transport, logistics and insurance.
Here are some key aspects of telematics:
Telematics systems use wireless communication technologies to transmit data. This can include information about a vehicle’s location, speed, fuel consumption, and more.
Global Positioning System (GPS) is a primary example of telematics that most drivers will be familiar with. GPS, of course, enables vehicle tracking in real time and location-based services that help so many businesses and individuals monitor vehicle journeys.
Data that relates to vehicle health and performance can be collected and transmitted with telematics. Such data may include but is not limited to information about engine status, battery health, pressure of each tire, and many other diagnostic elements.
For businesses operating vehicle fleets, telematics has been a game changer. Route optimization, fuel efficiency, and maintenance scheduling are just some of the benefits that telematics has brought to fleet management with its ability to monitor and optimize operations for groups of vehicles.
In the business of pricing risk, some insurance companies have been quick to recognize the power of telematics. Gathering data about driver behaviors, such as speed, braking patterns, and driving habits allows insurers to set insurance premiums that reflect true risk right down to an individual’s, or a business’s collective, driving habits.
By providing alerts and notifications in real time, telematics contributes to vehicle safety. In the event of an accident or a breakdown, for example, telematics systems can send an alert automatically to either emergency or breakdown services and provide the exact location of the vehicle concerned.
Vehicles today are often equipped with features like in-car navigation, entertainment, and connectivity that relies on telematics systems. Real-time traffic information and other modern conveniences for drivers powered by telematics systems.
It is clear that telematics already plays a pivotal role in enhanced vehicle efficiency, safety, and functionality, which makes it a key technology in industries including transportation, logistics, and insurance.
Holistic integrated testing throughout the development lifecycle informs developers and product owners earlier, enabling them to engineer quality into the product from the outset.
Quality Engineering telematics systems is paramount to ensure OEMs’ primary objectives of reducing cost and risk through improved reliability, performance, and security.
Quality Engineering through continuous testing and feedback to development facilitates continuous improvement in quality at an earlier stage. Defects found early are 100s or 1,000s of times cheaper to fix than if found in production – and 100,000s of times if you include brand and reputational damage.
Continuous testing, at every stage including requirements/user stories, code changes, and regression testing — in particular when coupled with the dynamic learning and informed adaptation in decision making of AI — ensures ongoing and holistic reliability, performance and security of telematics systems throughout their lifecycle.
Automation is an enabler for continuous testing of Telematics, providing a continuous feedback loop to drive early quality improvements. Embedding automated tests at every stage, so nothing slips through, helps developers test and learn throughout the CI/CD pipeline with tests run automatically every time the new code is checked in.
Automation can therefore help OEMs achieve greater efficiency within critical development processes, cutting testing times and removing human error.
Read our case study: Leading Telematics and Fleet Management Organization Gains Faster Test Coverage by Embracing Automation
OEMs should ensure functional testing is integrated into the CI/CD pipeline of their telematics system developments. Automated functionality tests should run as part of the build process, ensuring that new code changes do not break existing functionality. Functional testing plays a critical role in verifying system functionality, enabling efficient development cycles, and supporting continuous improvement in product quality. It should include:
OEMs should engineer performance factors into applications from the outset, making reliability an automated and accountable part of the whole development, not as an afterthought or a hope. Again the key goal for OEMs is to catch any deficiencies earlier in the SDLC and checks should include the following types of reliability key performance indicators:
OEMs can mitigate huge reputational and security risks if you engineer security into your applications from the outset, making security part of the whole development, not dangerously close to go-live. Security Engineering should include automated:
OEMs can ensure telematics systems’ user interface and overall user experience is user-friendly and easy to navigate before it’s too late. OEMs that build UX Engineering into their CICD lifecycle gain competitive advantage from enhanced customer satisfaction, especially those who design with focus groups and field testing with real users at the start not the end of the process.
Resilience Engineering involves assessing the telematics system’s ability to handle an increasing amount of data and users as the scale of operations grows. OEMs can use Resilience Engineering to verify that the telematics system remains available and performs reliably under normal operating conditions and during potential failure scenarios.
Telematics systems are already proving a pivotal force in shaping the future, not just of automotive innovation for OEMs and their end customers, but of linked industries like transportation, logistics and insurance.
Given the critical nature of telematics systems, comprehensive automated Quality Engineering is essential to building quality, security and user experience considerations into every part of the development lifecycle. This helps automotive OEMs reduce cost and risk by catching errors, defects, shortcomings and vulnerabilities earlier in the SLDC, and providing a reliable and secure experience for end users.
