Embedded software systems, e.g. automotive, robotic or automation systems are highly configurable and consist of many software components being available in different variants and versions. To identify the degree of reusability between these different occurrences of a component, it is necessary to determine the functional backward and forward compatibility between them. Based on this information it is possible to identify in which system context a component can be replaced safely by another version, e.g. exchanging an older component, or variant, e.g. introducing new features, to achieve the same functionality.

A software engineering department in a Daimler-Chrysler business unit was highly professional at developing embedded software for busses and coaches. However, customer specific add-ons were a regular source of hassle. Simple as they are, those individual requirements have to be implemented in hours or days rather than weeks or months. Poor quality or late upload into the bus hardware would cause serious cost and overhead. Established software engineering methods were considered inadequate and needed to be cut short. Agile methods offer guidance when quality, flexibility and high speed need to be reconciled. However, we did not adopt any full agile method, but added single agile practices to our process improvement toolbox. We suggested a number of classical process improvement activities (such as more systematic documentation and measurement) and combined them with agile elements (e.g. Test First Process). This combination seemed to foster acceptance of agile ideas and may help us to break the ice for a cautious extension of agile process improvement.

The World Wide Web is an emerging platform for information systems; however established system architectures for web systems focus mainly on the creation and storage of consistent hypermedia information structures and on the efficient distribution of the resulting documents. The interaction between the information users is seldom supported.