Repository based Infrastructures for effective Automotive Software Creation - an Experience Report

The development processes for software based automobile functions is getting more and more complex within OEM and supplier organizations. Safety regulations in many target markets require the stakeholders to integrate the development processes with multifaceted orthogonal analysis and design procedures. The main problems to overcome are that development models, documents and artifacts getting out of consistency very soon in the traditional processes, various tools are used in the development, but their integration is poor, automation doesn´t exist between the development process phases, concurrent work on specifications and models is practically impossible and the analysis of changes impact means manual, costly review of whole specification documents, ikv is working on software development process optimization and automation for some years now. We identified repository based tool integration infrastructures, fine grained version control, consistency control and impact analysis as well as automation to be the main ingredients to overcome the mentioned drawbacks. In this position paper, we elaborate more on these mechanisms and explain technical solutions and experiences from their application.