Analysis of the Business Effects of Software Architecture Refactoring in an Automotive Development Organization

This paper presents an exploratory study of an automotive manufacturer, which develops embedded software for over 150 products and has adopted a company-wide software product-line approach. The company is facing the introduction of a new software architecture in all products in near time. This architecture introduces new paradigms more explicitly, such as explicit software components and signal-based communication, newer technologies, and adheres to new standards. Concretely, the architecture consists of common infrastructure and other generic components. Such a fundamental and drastic technology change can be expected to have far-reaching consequences, both of technical and non-technical nature. In this study we systematically investigate the introduction of the new software architecture, by mapping individual elements of the architectural change to system properties and company functions. The study implies that the whole organization is affected, and the new architecture also influences the cooperation with suppliers.