Should We Adopt a New Version of a Standard? - A Method and its Evaluation on AUTOSAR

Paper in proceeding, 2016

The development of large software systems is usually based on a number of industrial standards that define a set of features and their requirements. In order to use new features specified in the standards, new releases of the standards need to be adopted together with their requirements. This requires a thorough impact analysis of the changes in the requirements that can be time-consuming considering their potentially high number. In order to facilitate the adoption of new releases of industrial standards in large software systems, we present a method based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis of requirements evolution. The method is evaluated in a case study of AUTOSAR - a standard used in the development of automotive software systems in cooperation with Volvo Car Group. The evaluation results show that the use of the pro- posed method can identify the most unstable AUTOSAR specifications and their requirements whose changes may have a significant impact on the automotive systems. This knowledge can increase the speed of adoption of new AUTOSAR releases by automotive vendors.