Measuring Size of Changes in Automotive Software Systems and their Impact on Product Quality

Paper in proceeding, 2011

The amount of software in modern cars is significant and is growing with releases of new cars. The evolutionary development of software systems means new releases require changes to the existing systems. The changes might have a positive and negative impact on the quality of the final product and software architects working with the changes often conduct impact analyses using metrics. In this paper, we present metrics used to measure the complexity and size of software systems with the purpose of identifying potential risk caused by the changes. The metrics are designed to support early phases of software development and to help reduce costly late changes to the architecture of the systems. Their main goal is to verify nonfunctional aspects of the system and identify parts that should be tested more in order to reduce the risk of deteriorated quality.