Cross-Organizational Challenges of Requirements Engineering in the AUTOSAR Ecosystem: An Exploratory Case Study

Paper in proceeding, 2015

AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR) is a central standardization in the automotive industry which was developed to address the increasing complexity in the automotive embedded development. In this paper, we share results from an interview-based case study in which we explore the requirements engineering process of an AUTOSAR-Tier-2 supplier. Our results confirm well-known challenges regarding requirements communication, and verification in the cross-organizational requirements engineering process. These challenges are related to those modules that handle complex sensors and actuators, where specific requirements from the car manufacturers are required beyond the AUTOSAR standard requirements. We report that using the AUTOSAR standard brings commodity advantages, however the presence of non-AUTOSAR requirements results in (partly well-known) requirements challenges in the automotive domain. We believe that approaching these challenges from a broad ecosystem perspective will allow future research to address these challenges with tailored requirements engineering processes that facilitate collaboration between all AUTOSAR ecosystem parties.