REST APIs are widely used in industry, in all different kinds of domains. An example is Volkswagen AG, a German automobile manufacturer. Established testing approaches for REST APIs are time consuming, and require expertise from professional test engineers. Due to its cost and importance, in the scientific literature several approaches have been proposed to automatically test REST APIs. The open-source, search-based fuzzer EVOMASTER is one of such tools proposed in the academic literature. However, how academic prototypes can be integrated in industry and have real impact to software engineering practice requires more investigation. In this paper, we report on our experience in using EVOMASTER at Volkswagen. We share our learnt lessons, and identify real-world research challenges that need to be solved.

Testing is an important task within software development. To write test cases and integrate them into an automated test suite requires a significant amount of work. Given a set of requirements and specifications of a software, testing is needed to verify its correctness. When done manually, it is an expensive and error prone task. To facilitate such work, automated test-case generation via tools could be useful. Test-case generation can be facilitated by deterministic algorithm-driven approaches or non-deterministic approaches such as with AI (e.g., evolutionary and LLM). The different approaches come with their strengths and weaknesses, which must be considered when integrating these approaches into a product test procedure in industry. Several novel testing techniques and tools have been developed in academia and industry, but how effective they are and how to integrate them in real-world large industrial scenarios is still unclear. In this paper, a systematic approach is presented to evaluate test-case generation methodologies and integrate them into a scalable enterprise setup. The specific context is black-box testing of REST APIs, based on their OpenAPI schemas. The aim is to facilitate IT product development and service delivery. The proposed Technology Adoption Performance Evaluation (TAPE) approach is evaluated by a case study within the Group IT of Volkswagen AG. We evaluated existing tools such as OpenAPI Generator, EvoMaster and StarCoder which are built on different technologies. Our results show that these tools are of benefit for test engineers to facilitate test-case specification and design within the Group IT of Volkswagen AG.

ABSTRACT The usage of micro‐services in IT services is increasing. As this growth continues, the importance of eco‐friendly design and operation becomes a significant factor. This study aims to evaluates the potential of Java frameworks that facilitate cloud‐native micro‐services in reducing the energy footprint throughout the release lifecycle. The release lifecycle view also looks into the development phase and its footprint impact respectively potentials to build overall more energy footprint optimized releases. Technology‐driven methods and tools based on micro‐service frameworks can help reduce the energy footprint at the micro‐service level. However, local optimizations at the micro‐service level cannot diminish the importance of more holistic approaches, such as optimizing the overall system, architecture and design of micro‐services. The concepts derived from this analysis can be implemented in industrial settings, as presented by the case study. The effects are measurable and represent a positive step towards more eco‐friendly cloud‐native micro‐service‐based IT service offerings.

Abstract Products and services are developed to realize chances on the market. Often, development teams are focusing primarily on the potential chances rather than on the corresponding risks of new products and services. However, it is possible to integrate the product and service quality risks early into the development procedures for a balanced and holistic view. The integration enables systematic mitigation and quality assurance actions to handle the risks. The article analyzes the literature related to quality risk approaches, identifies mature and generally applicable product and service risk approaches, and gives selected approach examples about its methodical evolution and how it can be integrated into the development procedures including soft‐skills development such as employee awareness and systematical training within organizations. A case study in the Group IT of the Volkswagen AG is discussed.

Abstract IT sustainability is becoming more and more important within the digitalization journey. It is more than green coding or the usage of power‐efficient hardware – it needs a holistic approach to leverage the potentials end‐to‐end in the software life‐cycle. The overall value stream within the IT organization is subject to sustainability alignment. This holistic alignment demands the engagement of different teams in large IT organizations. This article identifies the contributions of typical team stakeholders and evaluates their sustainability software engineering (SSE) contributions. This includes demand, architecture, design, implementation, operation, and usage. As an IT organization focuses on more than just software, the term sustainable IT engineering (SIE) fits better with the scope of organizational sustainability. The proposed approaches are presented based on instantiations within the Volkswagen Group IT.

Abstract The maturity of teams is related to the specific solutions they are building and maintaining. Every team needs generic skills and capabilities for successful teamwork. However, depending on the used technology, particular skills and qualifications are required to form a mature team to handle the solution‐related products and services adequately. Especially in agile organizations, autonomous teams have the responsibility for their solutions and their team development. To foster transparency and structured team development, the Technical Team Maturity (TTM) approach is presented. The TTM approach shapes and models specific technologies, for example, cloud technology demands about team skills and capabilities to form a reliable delivery team. The approach is divided into a technology‐specific profile and an evaluation model to support active usage in teams. The profile focuses on abstract and generic technology aspects. The evaluation model validates against the profile with a state‐of‐the‐art focus about the technology application to determine the maturity. The different maturity levels are mapped to belts—as a gamification aspect to foster continuous improvement in the teams with this benchmark. TTM is evaluated in the enterprise context of Volkswagen AG and Volkswagen Financial Services AG. It provides insights into the effectiveness of this approach in heterogeneous multiteam settings and its strengths, weaknesses, and limitations.

Abstract The maturity of organisations is measured using process assessment models like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/IEC 33001. Product quality is refined with internal and external product quality characteristics based on models like the ISO/IEC 25010. With the shift from the Tailorism‐driven process orientation to a more people‐centric organization, the process and product quality dimensions have to be extended by the teamwork quality (TWQ) dimension. For the sake of systematic organization development, this new third quality dimension needs to be integrated into existing quality frameworks to achieve a holistic quality approach. This article introduces agile TWQ as the method of choice. It explains its design, implementation and evaluation in the large enterprise context of the Volkswagen AG. It provides insights into the effectivity of this approach in heterogeneous multi‐team settings, as well as into its strengths, weaknesses, and limitations.

Organizations are looking for ways of establishing agile and lean delivery processes.In this paper, we propose a particular way which based on self-service kits (SSK's).The SSK approach can be used to share expert knowledge in an agile and scalable way to the teams by offering them approaches, methods and tools with background information about the addressed topic.An SSK is provided as a digital bundle of artifacts that help solving an issue related to agile teams.Built upon the pullprinciple, it supports team autonomy during teams' delivery procedures.An SSK addresses generic as well as domain specific topics.As all SSK's share a common structured approach to supporting an agile organization, they help systematically scaling expert knowledge.This leverages establishing best practices elaborated by experts in a large scale organization in a native agile manner.As an SSK is structured as a "how-to" guide including templates for learning by doing, it helps emphasizing quality aspects too.We demonstrate an example of the systematic application of the SSK approach as well as its scaling in the Volkswagen Group IT. T Scaling agile on large enterprise level with self-service kitsto support autonomous teams

In an industrial context, high software quality is mandatory in order to avoid costly patching. We present a state of the art analysis of approaches to ensure that a specific Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is ready for release. We analyze the requirements a Machine Learning (ML) system has to fulfill in order to comply with the needs of an automotive OEM. The main implication for projects relying on ML is a holistic assessment of possible quality risks. These risks may stem from implemented ML models and spread into the delivery. We present a methodological quality assurance (QA) approach and its evaluation.

Systematic requirements elicitation leads to higher quality products and reduces product risks. In Quality Engineering and Management, product risk mitigation is a key objective. Especially for new products, risk identification is a creative action. In this paper, we present a quality domain-specific design thinking approach to product risk identification and subsequent quality requirements elicitation. The approach systematically guides product teams within four steps in identifying their product-specific quality requirements and associated risks using ideation methods. Implemented in the form of an open self-service kit for teams, it has been designed for scaling in large enterprises. We validate our approach in a large global automotive OEM environment including automotive mobile online services and products, financial services, as well as IT systems development. The key outcome of the work is a design thinking based requirements elicitation method for product quality risks, as well as an implementation in the form of a self-service kit.

Organizations are looking for ways of establishing agile and lean process for delivery.Many approaches exist in the form of frameworks, methods and tools to setup an individual composition for a best fit.The challenge is that large organizations are heterogeneous and diverse, and hence there is no "one size fits all" approach.To facilitate a systematic implementation of agile and lean, this article proposes a transition kit based on abstraction.This kit scouts and bundles state of the art methods and tools from the agile and lean community to align them with governance and compliance aspects of the specific enterprise.Coaching of the application of the transition kit ensures an adequate instantiation.The instantiation handles business domain specific aspects and standards.A coaching governance ensures continuous improvement.An example of the systematic application of the transition approach as well as its scaling is demonstrated through its application in the Volkswagen Group IT.Scaling agile on large enterprise level -systematic bundling and application of state of the art approaches for lasting agile transitions

Abstract The culture of traditional organizations favors firmly established processes and standardization. Therefore, the adoption of Agile and Lean approaches in these organizations is a challenging issue. This paper presents an overview and outlook of the most well‐known Agile and Lean approaches in order to identify which kind of continuous software process improvement (SPI) is inherent in these approaches. The main objective of this research is to show that Lean and Agile SPI approaches can be pursued depending on the target environment, both in traditional and in agile organizations.

Abstract The transition from a classical to an agile software development procedure needs a structured and strategic roll out to realize the expected benefits of the transition phase. Quality assurance as part of the software development has also to be designed to realize its targets of the agile transition for adequate project and program quality assurance. Besides effectivity the economic aspects have to be implemented also in a value‐driven agile product quality assurance. This tension between effectivity and economy will be shown on the example of the Volkswagen group IT. The transition is mapped to the SPI Manifesto to demonstrate the currency in 2009 of the established values and principles for software process improvement.

Feature trees are a well-established instrument for domain analysis and modeling (Czarnecki and Eisenecker, 2000; Kang et al., 1990). But for extremely complex product families like a vehicle manufacturer's product range, they become very large, and thus cumbersome and inflexible. This is particularly true when changes to the tree's structure have to be managed and documented over a long period of time. Furthermore, a conflict of aims arises when using feature trees in large organizations: while a single global feature tree for the entire company is desirable, local amendments are indispensable because often some applications of the feature models require amendments not visible in other application contexts. A research project at DaimlerChrysler, being conducted in cooperation with the Technical University of Berlin, has examined this problem in detail and elaborated an approach based on a distribution of the feature tree definition over several hierarchical levels. Using this approach, amendments to the feature structure can be introduced locally at first, and can later become valid in a broader context, if desired. Currently the approach is being evaluated and refined in case studies.