Software development for automotive control units faces various challenges. From the market perspective, many product variants, short development cycles, and a high degree of innovation are required to flexibly react to customer needs. From the technological perspective, upcoming technologies such as variously electrified drivetrains, alternative fuels, and safety and comfort functions with powertrain intervention make the handling of control complexity necessary.

In reaction, development process requirements are formulated and standardized by reference process models such as Automotive SPICE, CMMI, or ISO 26262.

If software is applied to several projects for a longer period of time, the product quality degrades. For suitable countermeasures, an integrated quality assurance approach is necessary.

A testing strategy must involve adequate verification and validation methods and needs to be realized by an agile framework that allows for minimized manual testing effort, continuous software inspection, and traceability of test results over the entire project to facilitate frontloading of systematic software error mitigation.

In this session, we present a framework that aims to cover these demands.