• Silverio Martínez-Fernández, Claudia P. Ayala, Xavier Franch

• GESSI Research Group, UPC (Spain)

• Elisa Y. Nakagawa

• LabES Research Group, USP (Brazil)

A Survey on the Benefits andDrawbacks of AUTOSAR

2

Contents

I. Introduction

II. Research Method: a web-based survey

III. Results

I. Overview of the participants

II. AUTOSAR benefits

III. AUTOSAR drawbacks

IV. Threats to Validity

V. Conclusions

3

Introduction: Motivation

• Electronics & software of automotive domain:

lead over 90% of all innovations

determine up to 40% of a vehicle’s development costs, of which 50% to 70% are dedicated for the software of Electronic Control Units (ECU)

• Standardization

support to manage growing systems complexity, their integrations, and keeping the costs feasible

• AUTOSAR: an open industry standard for the automotive software architecture between suppliers and manufacturers

4

Introduction: AUTOSAR (1/2)

• AUTOSAR is a software reference architecture:

to standardize the ECU software architectures• aiming at components interoperability

for multiple organizations (e.g., OEMs, suppliers, tool developers and new market entrants) that share the automotive market domain

• Three main software layers: application layer, runtime environment, basic software

hardware independence

5

Introduction: AUTOSAR (2/2)

6

Introduction: Research Goal

• Research goal:

to help practitioners to make informed decisions while adopting software reference architectures in an industrial setting

• Two Research Questions:

RQ1: Which are the benefits of using AUTOSAR?

RQ2: Which are the drawbacks and risks of using AUTOSAR?

• Research Method:

a web-based survey

7

Method: Population

• Population:

the global community of practitioners that use AUTOSAR

• Recruiting Participants:

In professional meetings: 6th AUTOSAR Open Conference celebrated in Munich• responses in situ

• invitation to participate by e-mail

Social Networks:• LinkedIn groups:

– “Autosar”, ~ 5,000 members; and “AUTOSAR” ~ 1,000 members

• Twitter:– hashtag #AUTOSAR

Not in academic communities

8

Method: Questionnaire (1/2)

• Group 1 questions (mandatory): benefits&drawbacks

9

Method: Questionnaire (2/2)

• Group 2 questions (optional): context data

10

Results: Overview of Participants

• 51 valid responses

36 respondents (71%), groups of questions 1 and 2

15 respondents (29%), group of questions 1

n/a; 15; 29%

Automotive; 13; 25%

Informatics, Computer Science, Software

Engineering; 11; 22%

Electronics; 9; 18%

Other; 3; 6%

Education Area of Respondents (n=51)

n/a; 15; 29%

OEM; 12; 23%

Supplier; 10; 20%

Tool developer; 8;

16%

Consulting; 4; 8%

New market entrant; 2; 4%

Role of the company with respect to AUTOSAR (n=51)

11

Results: AUTOSAR Benefits

2

3

4

5

7

8

12

14

14

16

17

17

17

20

24

26

41

45

4%

6%

8%

10%

14%

16%

24%

27%

27%

31%

33%

33%

33%

39%

47%

51%

80%

88%

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50

None

Other

Facilitation

Novel design solutions

Reputation

Mission, vision and strategy

Risk reduction

Increase productivity

Enhanced quality

Best practices

Reduced maintenance costs

Reduced time-to-market

Knowledge repository

Reduced development costs

Improved communication

Interoperability

Reuse

Standardization

Number of respondents

Which are the benefits of using AUTOSAR? (n=51)

N Percentage

12

Results: AUTOSAR Drawbacks

1

1

5

8

10

11

15

18

21

26

30

33

2%

2%

10%

16%

20%

22%

29%

35%

41%

51%

59%

65%

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50

None

Other

Bad quality

Too specific or limiting

Bad documentation

Inefficient instantiation

Dependency in AUTOSAR

Too abstract

Term confusion

Learning curve

Initial investment

Complexity

Number of respondents

Which are the drawbacks and risks of using AUTOSAR? (n=51)

N Percentage

13

Threats to Validity

• Construct Validity:

Rigorous protocol

Suitable vocabulary

Confidentiality of respondents

• Internal Validity:

Response at any time, possibility of consulting registries

Voluntary participation

• External Validity:

Limited number of participants

Defining the context for generalization purposes

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Conclusions

• Survey results:

Most popular benefits of AUTOSAR:• standardization (88%), reuse (80%) and interoperability (51%)

Most important drawbacks of AUTOSAR:• complexity (65%), initial investment (59%) and learning curve (51%)

Directions to handle the major drawbacks of AUTOSAR:• A tool environment to improve its usability and handle its complexity

• More stable releases of AUTOSAR to decrease the cost of migrating among versions

15

Future Work

• To obtain more responses:

Participate! Less than 10 minutes

http://www.essi.upc.edu/~e-survey/index.php?sid=13916&lang=en

• Deeper analysis of the responses: from the perspective of different stakeholders (e.g., OEMs and

suppliers)

from different tiers (e.g., Tier 1 and Tier 2)

to indicate which problems and drawbacks should be tackled first in the AUTOSAR methodology

• To aggregate the evidence of this survey with the benefits and drawbacks reported in other studies about software reference architectures

Thank youComments and Questions

Silverio Martínez-Fernández, Claudia P. Ayala,Xavier Franch, Elisa Y. Nakagawa

{smartinez,cayala,franch}@essi.upc.edu, elisa@icmc.usp.br

Site: http://www.essi.upc.edu/~smartinez/?p=291