Tailoring the Process for Automotive Software Requirements Engineering

When an automotive organization goes from being part of the OEM organization to being a supplier organization, several Requirements Engineering issues must be faced. The first is how the organization adapts to a new parent organization and its software development processes. Another is recognizing the need for more formal artifacts to better define the responsibility boundary between customer and supplier. One other change is adapting to working in a distributed fashion when software development is split among multiple locations, while manufacturing entails yet another location. We recently piloted an automotive software development group through this change and this paper will report on the lessons we learned.