Challenges of Requirements Engineering in AUTOSAR ecosystems

Paper i proceeding, 2015

AUTOSAR has changed significantly how software is developed in the automotive sector. As a central standard, AUTOSAR enables reuse of software components as well as their interoperability. For AUTOSAR compliant ECU development, car manufacturers source Electronic Control Units (ECUs) from Tier-1 suppliers, but ask those Tier-1 suppliers to install AUTOSAR compliant basic software from a certified AUTOSAR-Tier-2 supplier. In this setup (to which we refer as the AUTOSAR ecosystem), the OEM has a direct business relationship with the Tier-1, but only an indirect relationship to the AUTOSAR-Tier-2 supplier, which leads to complex flows of requirements and related information between the organizations involved. In this extended abstract, we summarize preliminary results of a qualitative investigation of Requirements Engineering challenges in the AUTOSAR ecosystem. In particular, we interviewed 7 project managers from an AUTOSAR-Tier-2 supplier, and triangulated our results with 6 additional interviews with subjects from two Tier-1 suppliers and one OEM. We found that most of the requirements towards the AUTOSAR-Tier-2 supplier can be directly mapped to standard AUTOSAR components. However, a significant amount of requirements were new requirements and specific to the OEM or even a project. The well-known requirements engineering challenges we found to surface in the AUTOSAR ecosystem were mainly connected to these non-standard requirements. Standard and non-standard requirements are usually mixed, which makes it hard to fully leverage the potential benefits of reuse within the AUTOSAR standard. We argue that the holistic ecosystem perspective allows exploration of new strategies for mitigating this challenge.