The Empirical Software Engineering group receives funding of 500,000 € over three years to collaborate with the partners Asvin, DLR, Fraunhofer, Humboldt University Berlin, Hochschule Hamm-Lippe, INCHRON, KIT, Merantix, Osseno, Safetrans, SGS, TH Ingolstadt, TTTech, University of Oldenburg and Validas. Together, they work on adapting the DevOps processes and principles for the automotive domain. With the advent of over-the-air updates for vehicles, we can now create short development cycles for automotive software as well as receive direct feedback from the operating vehicles. This creates many challenges such as the frequent and fast safety verification of the updates, but also brings new opportunities such as quick updates for security problems or other defects as well as using operational data to improve and update safety cases.
The University of Stuttgart will in particular work on developing safety analysis methods for verifying small software updates ("delta safety analysis") and generating test cases for these updates. Furthermore, they will work on defining "leading indicators" to measure in operation and feed back this information into validating and updating assumptions in the safety case.