Context: The reliance on software as a distinguishing factor in the automotive industry is increasing. With a combined reliance on vendor-supplied software and cost-effective implementation, the AUTOSAR consortium was initialized to provide standardized platform specifications that enable re-use. Specifically, the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform (AP) specification aims to provide a high-performance service-oriented architecture. Objective: The goal of this study is to investigate what pain-points emerge when developing AUTOSAR Adaptive applications and whether they originate from the platform specification, its vendor-implementation, or its local usage. Methods: We conduct a Design Science Research study, developing a minimal AP that serves as an experimental prototype for our investigation. Results: We find that a combination of specification-inherent, implementation-based, and local practices contributes to the emergence of pain-points. Conclusions: We conclude that there are AUTOSAR specification-inherent reasons for pain-points, resulting from architectural choices and re-use goals. The implication for development organizations is the need to mitigate these effects through tooling that better supports configuration file management and reduces developer training time to properly understand the adaptive application runtime life-cycle.

Context: Large embedded systems in vehicles tend to grow in size and complexity, which causes challenges when maintaining these systems. Objective: We explore how developers perceive the relation between maintainability effort and various sources of complexity. Methods: We conduct a case study at Scania AB, a heavy vehicle OEM. The units of analysis are two large software systems and their development teams/organizations. Results: Our results show that maintainability effort is driven by system internal complexity in the form of variant management and complex hardware control tasks. The maintainability is also influenced by emergent complexity caused by the system’s longevity and constant growth. Besides these system-internal complexities, maintainability effort is also influenced by external complexities, such as organizational coordination and business needs. During the study, developer trade-off strategies for minimizing maintainability effort emerged. Conclusions: Complexity is a good proxy of maintainability effort, and allows developers to create strategies for managing the maintainability effort. Adequate complexity metrics include both external aspects—e.g., coordination complexity—and internal ones—e.g., McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity.