9.1.2 Future Trends in Automotive Requirements Engineering

In the last few years, requirements engineering for software-based systems has attracted a great deal of attention in the automotive industry. Requirements specification documents have been recognized as a crucial element in the software and system quality chain. Consequently, several industrial initiatives have been launched to improve requirements specification quality, the creation process, and tool support. For instance, many automotive OEMs have introduced requirements engineering expert groups and piloting of requirements management tools. Despite the fact that the situation is still substantially heterogeneous, we observe a common level that the more mature projects have adapted as the current state of practice. However, due to methodological and tool restrictions, this level still falls very short of the full potential of tool-supported systematic requirements management in the automotive domain. In this paper, we summarize the current state of the practice in requirements engineering for software-based automotive systems (such as electronic control units) and identify future research directions and tool enhancement requirements. Additionally, we try to identify some popular myths, i.e. ideas that are often mentioned in the context of automotive requirements engineering but which seem to be unrealistic and/or undesirable from our point of view.