An Empirical Study on Software Testing Practices in Automotive

This paper presents the results of an empirical study aimed at characterizing and analyzing recurrent software development weaknesses in automotive industry. In the automotive domain software development is mainly demanded to specialized software suppliers that are required by car makers to improve and measure the process quality of their projects by applying process models such as Automotive SPICE (TM). The authors, as Automotive SPICE assessors, have directly recorded and identified specific software process improvement opportunities on the basis of the evidences gathered from real software development projects during a significant number of assessments performed at several organizations world-wide. This paper, that focuses specifically on the software testing-related processes, is a step of a wider study that the authors are carrying out. Such a study aims at identifying, using data from real automotive software development projects, common software development weaknesses having negative impact according Automotive SPICE (TM), in order to derive a picture of the state of the practice of software development in automotive and to provide researchers and practitioners with a reference for improvement initiatives aimed at solving those weaknesses.