Identifying Optimal Sets of Standardized Architectural Features - A Method and its Automotive Application

Industrial standards are used to formalize procedures, rulesand guidelines for the industry to follow. Following a stan-dard requires continuous adoption of the new standardizedfeatures where only their subset is required by individualcompanies. Therefore the prioritization of the features andthe assessment of their impact on the development projectsis crucial for the success of the project. In software engineer-ing, industrial standards are used increasingly often to stan-dardize a language for designing architectural componentsof the system by defining domain-specific meta-models. Thepurpose is to assure the interoperability between a numberof software tools exchanging the architectural models. Inthis paper, we present a method for identifying optimal setsof new standardized architectural features to be adopted inthe development projects. The optimization is done basedon the assessment of their benefit for the projects and theestimated cost of re-work in the modeling tools according tothe changes in the standardized meta-model. We evaluatethe method by applying it on 14 new architectural featuresof a new release of the AUTOSAR standard which is followedin the development of the automotive software systems