MUNICH: The BMW Group celebrated the official opening of its autonomous driving campus in Unterschleißheim, Germany with BMW AG member of the board of management Klaus Fröhlich and Bavarian state premier Markus Söder attending during the inauguration.

The German carmaker boasts that its new 23,000 square-metre campus with room for 1,800 employees is a state-of-the-art centre that covers every base when it comes to offering greater capacity for innovation and increased development efficiency.



Fifteen months ago, the company took the decision to pool together its development expertise in the fields of vehicle connectivity and highly / fully automated driving at a single location.

The campus' new site is located close to the Research and Innovation Centre as well as a nearby link to the motorway network. It is 31km north of here.

The company is now intending to drive forward development of highly automated vehicles with the new campus and is looking to recruit IT specialists and software developers in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analysis.

The autonomous driving campus is opening its doors to “new working environments” – i.e. an open-plan layout, intelligent and flexible use of office space, and a multifaceted and creative workplace.

The benefits for the development experts employed here are clear: flexibility, efficiency, a high level of autonomy and short distances.

This means, for example, that a software developer working at the new campus can immediately test out freshly written code in a vehicle that is just a short walk away.

New working environments go hand in hand with a new employee and management culture, and managers work in the same open-plan office spaces as their staff.

This enhances interaction and facilitates communications, resulting in effective teamwork in the development of highly complex products.

The company is the first in the automotive industry to apply the agile working model systematically and universally for an entire specialist area – in this case across autonomous driving and driver assistance, from the research phase all the way through to series production development.

Agile working models form a crucial basis for efficient, future-proof development.

The open campus structure offers excellent conditions and exceptional support for scrum teams, and therefore lends itself perfectly to the agile software development process.

Scrum teams have an interdisciplinary structure, meaning that a variety of skills are brought together.

They handle complex sub-processes, working independently with an end-to-end approach and the high degree of flexibility allows the teams to react quickly and effectively to new requirements.

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