AutoToolVCC: Variable consistency check tool for automotive software projects. (6th November 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Xie, Pingfu; Wang, Yunlong; He, Bo; Xie, Guoqi
• Other Names: Zhou Junlong guestEditor.; Kritikakou Angeliki guestEditor.; Zhu Dakai guestEditor.; Lastra Jose L. Martinez guestEditor.; Hu Shiyan guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: Software, practice & experience. Volume 51:Number 11(2021)
• Page Start: 2306
• Page End: 2316
• Publication Date: 2020-11-06
• Subjects: automotive software practice -- automotive software project -- variable consistency check; Computer software -- Periodicals; Computer programming -- Periodicals; Computer programs -- Periodicals; 005.3
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.2923
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0644

Abstract

Abstract: Automotive software systems have become increasingly complex and huge, leading to long development cycle and increased development difficulty. When a complete automotive software project has reached a scale of several gigabytes, the complicated development process is prone to produce the following two irregular problems: (1) variable inconsistency problem and (2) code coexistence problem. These irregular problems may eventually lead to serious consequences, such as car crashes. In response to the above irregular problems, we develop a variable consistency check tool called AutoToolVCC for automotive software projects. AutoToolVCC divides the variable consistency check process into two stages: (1) extracting all variable information from the automotive software project and (2) checking the consistency of the variables through the variable preprocessing technique and the variable attribute check technique. After an actual check of multiple automotive software projects (approximately 500–1000 MB in size) provided by an automotive manufacturer, the accuracy of variable consistency check is as high as 100%, and the check time only takes about 10–30 s, whereas the pervious plain method needs 100–600 s.