Improving robustness of AUTOSAR software components with design by contract: A study within Volvo AB

The increasing volume of software in vehicles makes robustness a significant quality attribute. In this paper, we investigate the use of Design by Contract to improve the robustness of existing AUTOSAR software components. The main idea of DbC is to view the relationship between two components as a formal contract that expresses component’s rights and obligations. The proposed solution is validated by testing both the original and modified components and by comparing the results. The results prove that Design by Contract greatly increases the robustness of AUTOSAR software components: none of the tests for the modified software components failed. We also identified some weaknesses of the proposed approach, such as (i) potential additional errors brought by the newly-built components, and (ii) difficulty in modifying components that are automatically generated through some model-to-code generation tools.