A Taxonomy for Tools, Processes and Languages in Automotive Software Engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graphical taxonomy tailored for automotive software engineering, helping practitioners classify and select suitable tools, processes, and languages based on project-specific factors.

Contribution

It presents a new automotive-focused taxonomy that overcomes limitations of existing ones by incorporating a comprehensive classification approach for engineering methods.

Findings

The taxonomy provides clear classification of automotive engineering methods.

It enables better decision-making for tool and process selection.

Applied to common methods, it demonstrates practical utility.

Abstract

Within the growing domain of software engineering in the automotive sector, the number of used tools, processes, methods and languages has increased distinctly in the past years. To be able to choose proper methods for particular development use cases, factors like the intended use, key-features and possible limitations have to be evaluated. This requires a taxonomy that aids the decision making. An analysis of the main existing taxonomies revealed two major deficiencies: the lack of the automotive focus and the limitation to particular engineering method types. To face this, a graphical taxonomy is proposed based on two well-established engineering approaches and enriched with additional classification information. It provides a self-evident and -explanatory overview and comparison technique for engineering methods in the automotive domain. The taxonomy is applied to common automotive engineering methods. The resulting diagram classifies each method and enables the reader to select appropriate solutions for given project requirements.