Adapting Agile Principles for Requirements Engineering in Automotive Software Development

Requirements engineering plays a significant role in successfully executing automotive projects. Due to critical factors like the high system complexity, the hardware-software-dependency and safety criticality, automotive software development is very different from traditional software engineering. It has long development cycles with late system integration and test phase, which leads to late customer feedback. This makes the process vulnerable to requirements engineering issues, e.g. insufficient or unclear requirements, late requirements changes, and in general, the high number and high complexity of requirements. The automotive industry is slowly adopting agile practices to encounter such issues, e.g. by introducing iterative, incremental development cycles. This contribution investigates the issues related to requirements engineering in automotive software development and proposes agile principles as a possible solution. Literature-based research identifies relevant root causes and process deficits regarding requirement-related issues. The paper also provides recommendations and solutions from agile methods for the identified issues and respective cause-and-effect chains. A survey with practitioners from five automotive companies has been conducted to check the validity of hypotheses about the issues and improvements. Literature findings and survey results conclude that adapting agile principles is a potential way to address requirement-related issues in automotive software development.