Summary Efficient testing is a crucial prerequisite to engineer reliable automotive software successfully. However, manually deriving test cases from ambiguous textual requirements is costly and error‐prone. Model‐based software engineering captures requirements in structured, comprehensible, and formal models, which enables early consistency checking and verification. Moreover, these models serve as an indispensable basis for automated test case derivation. To facilitate automated test case derivation for automotive software engineering, we conducted a survey with testing experts of the BMW Group and conceived a method to extend the BMW Group's specification method for requirements, design, and test methodology by model‐based test case derivation. Our method is realized for a variant of systems modeling language activity diagrams tailored toward testing automotive software and a model transformation to derive executable test cases. Hereby, we can address many of the surveyed practitioners' challenges and ultimately facilitate quality assurance for automotive software.

Abstract-Component and Connector (C&C) view specifications, with corresponding verification and synthesis techniques, have been recently suggested as a means for formal yet intuitive structural specification of C&C models. In this paper we report on our recent experience in applying C&C views in industrial practice, where we aimed to answer questions such as: could C&C views be practically used in industry, what are challenges of systems engineers that the use of C&C views could address, and what are some of the technical obstacles in bringing C&C views to the hands of systems engineers. We describe our experience in detail and discuss a list of lessons we have learned, including, e.g., a missing abstraction concept in C&C models and C&C views that we have identified and added to the views language and tool, that engineers can create graphical C&C views quite easily, and how verification algorithms scale on real-size industry models. Furthermore, we report on the non-negligible technical effort needed to translate Simulink block diagrams to C&C models. We make all materials mentioned and used in our experience electronically available for inspection and further research.

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Embedded software systems, e.g. automotive, robotic or automation systems are highly configurable and consist of many software components being available in different variants and versions. To identify the degree of reusability between these different occurrences of a component, it is necessary to determine the functional backward and forward compatibility between them. Based on this information it is possible to identify in which system context a component can be replaced safely by another version, e.g. exchanging an older component, or variant, e.g. introducing new features, to achieve the same functionality.This paper presents a model checking approach to determine behavioral compatibility of Simulink models, obtained from different component variants or during evolution. A prototype for automated compatibility checking demonstrates its feasibility. In addition implemented optimizations make the analysis more efficient, when the compared variants or versions are structurally similar.A case study on a driver assistance system provided by Daimler AG shows the effectiveness of the approach to automatically compare Simulink components.