Characterizing Model Usage in Embedded Software Engineering: A Case Study

During development of complex products, such as automotive software, models – formal and informal – are used throughout the development process by different roles and for different purposes – as requirement, as implementation or as documentation. This paper reports results from a case-study of the development of embedded software at a Swedish vehicle manufacturer. We investigated use of models from high-level product planning to low-level requirements specifications for software components. Furthermore, we investigated the distribution of effort among the models, requirements and other artefacts. The goal was to explore the spectrum of modelling techniques, methods and languages used and to establish a baseline for comparison with the state-of-the-art and other companies. The results show that there exist at least 8 different modelling notations. Moreover, we found that the majority of effort was spent on behaviour models, while static models – such as high-level design and requirements – were considered most important