Abstract
With concerns growing over depleting fuel reserves and global warming, automotive manufacturers are adopting various methods to meet these challenges. In order to do so, the electronic content in the vehicles is increasing rapidly. Software is a key part of the electronic systems and the focus on quality, reliability, safety and traceability within the software systems is gathering momentum. To meet these developments, new standards have been established by manufacturers and suppliers to assure software quality with focus on safety systems. This paper focusses on the comprehensive testing and traceability process for lean and efficient software development at FEV GmbH.
The test-driven model based software development approach involves the definition of test cases for the automotive software prior to the software implementation. While the specification follows the Autosar standard, implementation is realized model-based, generating control code fully automatically with established code generation tools. Test cases are defined e.g. via the classification tree method for this purpose. In-house developed tools are tailored to automotive needs: the agile software development method “Continuous Integration” is applied to software models embedding diverse verification and validation methodologies as well as code integration and software documentation. The bi-directional traceability between the work products is ensured by an optimized interplay between the process and applied tools. This ensures software quality across various release versions and is also critical for safety functions within the software. The processes and tools developed in-house meet the requirements as laid down by the ISO 26262 standard for automotive systems.
The discussed process leads to an increase in the software quality and early detection of faults in the software during the development process. This frontloading approach reduces time and costs of hardware-in-loop testing and in-Vehicle testing and improves the quality of the software at the same time. This is crucial in the current cost and quality driven environment.
KEYWORDS – Agile software development, ISO 26262, AUTOSAR, classification tree method, bidirectional traceability