Quality management and quality assessment when developing automotive software

Today software is the major innovation factor for the automotive industry: an overwhelming portion of innovations is implemented in software. Hence, it is high time for a change: Professional quality management and assessment is a highly sensitive topic and needs to be dealt with much more attentively. Software in today's vehicles has grown by far too complicated now to be controlled and validated with intuitive or heuristic methods. The complexity of these structures, involving as they do sub-systems, bus segments, hierarchical relationships and interactions, means that professional quality management is needed right from the start. Professional quality management and assessment means prevention of programming failures, measuring software quality and controlling test coverage. This article from Telelogic outlines ways to achieve these objective by means of a proven and effective environment for software engineers and project leaders.