Identifying Optimal Sets of Standardized Architectural Features - A Method and its Automotive Application
Journal article, 2015
Industrial standards are used to formalize procedures, rules
and guidelines for the industry to follow. Following a stan-
dard requires continuous adoption of the new standardized
features where only their subset is required by individual
companies. Therefore the prioritization of the features and
the assessment of their impact on the development projects
is crucial for the success of the project. In software engineer-
ing, industrial standards are used increasingly often to stan-
dardize a language for designing architectural components
of the system by defining domain-specific meta-models. The
purpose is to assure the interoperability between a number
of software tools exchanging the architectural models. In
this paper, we present a method for identifying optimal sets
of new standardized architectural features to be adopted in
the development projects. The optimization is done based
on the assessment of their benefit for the projects and the
estimated cost of re-work in the modeling tools according to
the changes in the standardized meta-model. We evaluate
the method by applying it on 14 new architectural features
of a new release of the AUTOSAR standard which is followed
in the development of the automotive software systems.