Reactis Support for Automotive SPICE#

RSITR 7.1

January 31, 2025

binary code (zeros and ones)

 

When an organization undertakes a large engineering project, the probability of success increases if a set of well-defined processes is followed. Doing so breaks the big task in to smaller ones and lets the team benefit from the expertise developed during prior, similar projects. Additionally, if the processes followed are defined by a standards authority, the concepts and common vocabulary facilitate communication both within the organization and between the organization and its suppliers and customers. Automotive SPICE ®[1], developed by the German Association of the Automotive Industry (which has the acronym VDA in the German language), defines a collection of processes helpful for the development of automotive applications. Automotive SPICE consists of:

  1. a process reference model (PRM) that defines processes for system engineering, hardware engineering, software engineering, as well as supporting processes;

  2. a process assessment model (PAM) that defines a framework for determining how well an organization implements each process in the PRM.

Performing either a self-assessment or an assessment by an outside party benefits an organization by:

  1. demonstrating to customers that their product is of high quality

  2. providing a path for continuous improvement of the organization’s processes.

In this white paper, we focus on the software engineering process group (SWE) and how the Reactis®[2] suite of test and verification tools can assist with the activities recommended by the SWE processes. Reactis supports a model-based design process that uses MATLAB®/Simulink®/Stateflow®[3] and C code. Reactis for Simulink automatically generates comprehensive yet compact test suites from Simulink models. The generated tests can be used for regression testing, for back-to-back testing of C code against the model, and can also uncover runtime errors in the model. Reactis Validator supports checking if a Simulink model satisfies its requirements. A variety of coverage metrics (including decision coverage, condition coverage, and MC/DC) are tracked both for the model and the corresponding C code. As will be elaborated in this paper, the array of functionality offered by Reactis supports the efficient performance of base practices recommended by the Automotive SPICE processes in the SWE group.