The suppliers of software-intensive electronic automotive components are facing technical challenges due to the innovation rush and the growing time pressure from customers. As the quality of on-board automotive electronic systems is strongly dependent on the quality of their development practices, car manufacturers and suppliers proactively focus on improving technical and organizational processes. Automotive SPICE (ASPICE) is today the reference standard for assessing and improving automotive electronics processes and projects in this setting. As car manufacturers use ASPICE to qualify their suppliers of software-intensive systems, such a standard becomes a market demand. This paper identifies and discusses the benefits and impact of the integration and harmonization of Technical Debt Management (TDM) in an ASPICE-compliant software development project. Besides this paper provides a conceptual framework and a reference process description for the integration of ASPICE and TDM practices in a sample Software Engineering process.

In the automotive domain, the development of software-intensive components is mainly demanded to particular suppliers that are required by car manufacturers a.k.a. OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) to measure and, eventually, improve their development process by applying process models such as Automotive SPICE. Automotive SPICE is a widely-applied reference framework providing a set of requested practices in the development life-cycle, including system and software testing.This paper aims at contributing in identifying what are the most frequent weaknesses in system and software testing in automotive. The authors present the results of an empirical study aimed at characterizing and analyzing recurrent system and software testing weaknesses in automotive. The authors, as Automotive SPICE assessors, have evaluated requirement management practices on the basis of the evidences gathered from real industrial development projects during a significant number of assessments performed at several organizations world-wide.This paper is intended to derive a picture of the state-of-the-practice of system and software testing in automotive focusing on the development of software-intensive automotive components. The purpose is to provide researchers and practitioners with a reference for improvement initiatives aimed at solving those weaknesses.

In the automotive domain the development of software-intensive components is mainly demanded to specialized suppliers that are required by car manufacturers a.k.a. OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) to measure and, eventually, improve their development process by applying process models such as Automotive SPICE. Automotive SPICE is therefore a widely-applied reference framework providing a set of requested practices in the development life-cycle, including requirements management. Requirements management is a key issue in automotive because the high volatility of requirements during projects and the need of interactions among different stakeholders. This paper aims at contributing in identifying what are the most frequent weaknesses in requirements management in automotive. The authors present the results of an empirical study aimed at characterizing and analyzing recurrent requirement management weaknesses in automotive. The authors, as Automotive SPICE assessors, have evaluated requirement management practices on the basis of the evidences gathered from real industrial development projects during a significant number of assessments performed at several organizations world-wide. This paper is intended to derive a picture of the state-of-the-practice of requirements management in automotive focusing on the development of software-intensive automotive components. The purpose is to provide researchers and practitioners with a reference for improvement initiatives aimed at solving those weaknesses.

This paper presents the results of an empirical study aimed at pointing out common weaknesses in software development in automotive industry. In automotive software development is mainly demanded to specialized software suppliers that are required by car makers to improve and measure the process quality of their projects by applying process models such as Automotive SPICETM. The authors, as Automotive SPICE assessors, have directly observed and analyzed specific software process improvement opportunities during a significant number of assessments performed at several organizations. This paper, that focuses specifically on the project management and quality assurance processes, is an initial step of a wider study that the authors are carrying out. Such a study aims at identifying, using data from automotive software development projects, common software development weaknesses having negative impact according Automotive SPICETM, in order to give a reference for improvement initiatives aimed at solving those weaknesses.

ICT can provide a definitive contribution in reducing CO2 emissions and, in general, in the environment preservation. Because its pervasiveness in today's life, software in particular plays an important role in achieving such a goal. Software process is the combination of those practices, directly or indirectly involved in software development, operation, and maintenance. In previous papers the authors addressed the topic of evaluating the sustainability of software products. In this paper the focus is on the evaluation of the sustainability of the software process, i.e. The measurement of the extent the process is performed by having care of the environment and by minimizing its impact on the environment. To do that, a sustainability measurement framework for software process is defined. Such a framework is composed by Sustainability Levels, Sustainability Process Attributes and being compliant with the requirements stated in the new ISO/IEC 33000 series standard for software process assessment.

The ever-increasing pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) not only is determining radical changes in everyone’s life-style, in the social organizations, and in the economic dynamics, but it is causing relevant direct and indirect effects on the environment as well. One of the aspects not yet sufficiently addressed in literature is the sustainability of the software lifecycle. In this paper, we focus on the sustainability management of software development projects. In the practice, software development projects are managed by considering principally parameters as time, costs and quality of work products. We propose a methodological approach aimed at identifying sustainability indicators to be used in project management to set up sustainability objectives for a software development project, to control their achievement during the project itself and, possibly, to adopt corrective actions to maintain the project aligned with them. The availability of such sustainability indicators may contribute to reduce the carbon footprint of the activities performed in software development projects as well as to speed-up the development of a green culture in organizations developing software.

There is growing attention paid to the increasing in the global carbon dioxide production and to the subsequent issue of sustainability in ICT-related projects. But very few information and time has been spent right now for determining a set of related measures from sustainable processes. Moving from a new set of three sustainable processes in the SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) format, this paper proposes a related approach for creating a sustainability measurement plan, with the aim to integrate further information elements for improving the decision-making process.

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Today automotive is an application field where innovation is growing at the highest rate. Innovation in automotive is principally due to the market-driven demand for electronic devices on the vehicles. Electronic equipments, more and more complex and connected by CANs (control area networks), control more than 85% of the automobilepsilas functionalities. The way European automotive industry has been facing the challenges arisen in the last years is the object of this paper. The authors, who have been involved for a decade in the technological evolution of automotive industry as well as in the Automotive SPICE initiative, starting from their experience provide a picture of the achievements and the open issues in the European automotive industry.

Electronic control units and on-board networks for automotive applications cover a big variety of functions that in many cases are responsible of safety critical behavior of the vehicle. Safety needs and goals claim that the software involved in such functions be designed by adopting opportune methods and practices. The paper presents a survey on most of these practices in the light of emerging standards.

Requirements analysis is an important phase in a software project. Automatic evaluation of natural language (NL) requirements documents has been proposed as a means to improve the quality of the system under development. QuARS Express is an automatic analyzer of natural language (NL) requirements able to manage complex and structured requirement documents containing metadata, and to produce an analysis report rich of information that points out linguistic defects and indications about the writing style of NL requirements.

Requirements evolve during the software development process. Requirements specification evolution determines changes both in terms of level of details and style of representation and it brings the requirements from the initial statement of the customer needs towards more detailed documents able to drive the software design, construction and verification. Controlling the evolution of requirements, usually written in natural language, is very important for the success of the whole software project because every step in the evolutionary path of requirements can introduce undesired changes or lacks of information. This paper describes an approach based on the formal concepts analysis that allows a systematic and precise verification of the consistency among different stages of natural language requirements evolution.

The quality of software products depends on the quality of the requirements used to create them. Expressiveness (i.e., the ability to convey the intended meaning by avoiding ambiguities and readability problems) is an important quality characteristic of natural language requirements. This paper describes an empirical study that used data from an industrial software project to identify possible relationships between expressiveness defects in natural language requirements and failures during testing. The study shows that test failures occur more frequently when there exist requirements cases with expressiveness defects

The SPLC doctoral symposium provides a platform for young researchers to present their work to an international audience and discuss it with each other and with experts in the field. The symposium addresses research activities in the field of Software Product Lines Topics of Interest include all aspects of the development phases, management, evaluation, reuse, and maintenance of software product lines.

The Use Case formalism is an effective way of capturing both business process and functional system requirements in a very simple and easy-to-learn way. Use Cases may be modeled in a graphical way (e.g. using the UML notation), mainly serving as a table of content for Use Cases. System behavior can more effectively be specified by structured natural language (NL) sentences. The use of NL as a way to specify the behavior of a system is however a critical point, due to the inherent ambiguity originating from different interpretations of natural language descriptions. We discuss the use of methods, based on a linguistic approach, to analyze functional requirements expressed by means of textual (NL) Use Cases. The aim is to collect quality metrics and detect defects related to such inherent ambiguity. In a series of preliminary experiments, we applied a number of tools for quality evaluation of NL text (and, in particular, of NL requirements documents) to an industrial Use Cases document. The result of the analysis is a set of metrics that aim to measure the quality of the NL textual description of Use Cases. We also discuss the application of selected linguistic analysis techniques that are provided by some of the tools to semantic analysis of NL expressed Use Case.