  Using continuous development, deployment, and monitoring (CDDM) to understand
and improve applications in a customer's context is widely used for non-safety
applications such as smartphone apps or web applications to enable rapid and
innovative feature improvements. Having demonstrated its potential in such
domains, it may have the potential to also improve the software development for
automotive functions as some OEMs described on a high level in their financial
company communiqus. However, the application of a CDDM strategy also faces
challenges from a process adherence and documentation perspective as required
by safety-related products such as autonomous driving systems (ADS) and guided
by industry standards such as ISO-26262 and ISO21448. There are publications on
CDDM in safety-relevant contexts that focus on safety-critical functions on a
rather generic level and thus, not specifically ADS or automotive, or that are
concentrating only on software and hence, missing out the particular context of
an automotive OEM: Well-established legacy processes and the need of their
adaptations, and aspects originating from the role of being a system integrator
for software/software, hardware/hardware, and hardware/software. In this paper,
particular challenges from the automotive domain to better adopt CDDM are
identified and discussed to shed light on research gaps to enhance CDDM,
especially for the software development of safe ADS. The challenges are
identified from today's industrial well-established ways of working by
conducting interviews with domain experts and complemented by a literature
study.
