Integrated and Iterative Requirements Analysis and Test Specification: A Case Study at Kostal

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated, iterative scenario-based technique combining top-down and bottom-up strategies, using behavior-driven development and NLP, to improve requirements and test specifications for complex automotive systems, demonstrated through a case study at Kostal.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combined approach for requirements and test specification that integrates behavior-driven development with NLP techniques for component analysis.

Findings

Supports improved requirements and test specifications for complex systems

Demonstrates feasibility through a case study at Kostal

Enhances specification quality for integrated system behavior

Abstract

Currently, practitioners follow a top-down approach in automotive development projects. However, recent studies have shown that this top-down approach is not suitable for the implementation and testing of modern automotive systems. Specifically, practitioners increasingly fail to specify requirements and tests for systems with complex component interactions (e.g., e-mobility systems). In this paper, we address this research gap and propose an integrated and iterative scenario-based technique for the specification of requirements and test scenarios. Our idea is to combine both a top-down and a bottom-up integration strategy. For the top-down approach, we use a behavior-driven development (BDD) technique to drive the modeling of high-level system interactions from the user's perspective. For the bottom-up approach, we discovered that natural language processing (NLP) techniques are suited to make textual specifications of existing components accessible to our technique. To integrate both directions, we support the joint execution and automated analysis of system-level interactions and component-level behavior. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by conducting a case study at Kostal (Tier1 supplier). The case study corroborates, among other things, that our approach supports practitioners in improving requirements and test specifications for integrated system behavior.