Abstract
The growing importance of E/E in the car and especially of software functionality poses a challenge for embedded software development. The main challenge of complexity could lead to decreasing Quality and increasing costs and development times. One answer to this challenge is model-based software development with its positive effects like front-loading of activities and the possibility of early fault finding. First experiences with model-based software development already indicate and improvement of quality, cost reduction and shorter time-to-market. But different approaches inside the model-based world, incompatible tools and no continuity in the tool-chains still constrain the work as they make collaboration difficult: both between OEM and supplier as well as between different departments within one company.
Quintessence: Standardising activities make the most of the model-based software development approach.
ALTRAN actively participates in two large partnerships which aim at standardising specific parts of an embedded software development process for the automotive world: AUTOSAR and MODELISAR. This allows us to analyse the relationship between the work and progress within the standardising partnerships with its applicability to state-of-the-art software development projects (engineering consulting by ALTRAN Technologies). Our analysis focuses on the evaluation of processes and their tool-chains, in how far the standardizing activities enable better continuity or fluency of the software development steps, starting with requirements analysis, covering architecture, design, implementation and ending with testing activities for the whole system.
The reasons for the necessity of standardisation as already indicated in the introduction form the basis of a comparison of the effectiveness of software development processes. Standardisation results coming from partnerships between different (mostly competing) companies are to be taken into account as well as company-internal rules / guidelines / checkers / converters which in some cases already optimise the software development process up to the limits defined by the used tool-chains. The perception of a standard in series development can be used to deduce crucial points for successful standardisation like the importance of tool coupling and its description on meta-level on the technical side or the openness for the use-cases of all partners on the organisational side. Although a certain pressure for cost reduction might be a negative outcome of standardisation activities, the positive effect on the interoperability of tools will clearly dominate in future trends.
Keywords: AUTOSAR, MODELISAR, Software Architecture, Co-Simulation, Meta- Model