Reengineering embedded automotive software

The fact that software ages holds for embedded automotive software as well as for any other kind of software. In comparison to IT software, the automotive domain has to deal with different kinds of requirements, such as real time properties, feedback control, and constrained resources. Therefore, used programming languages are C - to meet resource constraints - and data flow oriented graphical languages - to meet the used engineering method and notation of feedback control engineers. This makes the software quite different from what the software maintenance and reengineering community is usually working on, and their results are seldom directly applicable. In this paper, we describe results of a Bosch-internal research project that focused on the adaption of existing reengineering techniques and methods to embedded automotive software development. The goal was to make software maintenance more efficient by a) preventing software ageing and b) supporting program comprehension. Our approach was to make existing reengineering techniques usable for series development in an effective and efficient way. The result is a set of reengineering tools and practices that are specialized for the needs of the automotive domain and usable in practice.