Page 1 of 10 A NEW PROCESS MODEL FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS CONTROL FOR AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY Dr. Adnan Shaout* and Tejas Chhaya* *The University Of Michigan – Dearborn, 4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, Michigan 48128 USA shaout@umich.edu , chhayat@gmail.com Key words – Software processes, Embedded systems controls, Automotive, Quality ABSTRACT For the major organizations, businesses and government agencies the biggest constraints are cost, schedule, reliability, and quality for a given software product. And hence, more and more emphasis is put on software processes asking software engineers to follow it. The goal of this paper is to present a modified software process model using the Personal Software Process SM (PSP SM ), Team Software Process SM (TSP SM ) and six sigma. The new process model was used for an embedded systems project in automotive industry with ‘Moderately complex and medium size’. The result of using this new process model has show 70% improvement in defects/KLOC. INTRODUCTION In a big organization for a given product usually there is lots of different people work within a group/team for which an organized effort is required to avoid repetition and get a quality end product. Typically, for big and complex projects there are many teams work with one goal to deliver the FINAL product. Efforts are required to coordinate hardware, software, and systems among these teams as well as for resulting issues at various levels. In order to succeed for such a high degree of complex project a structured process is required that is not too complicated and yet very efficient. 1 QUALITY, RELIABILITY, COST & SOFTWARE PROCESS 1.1 WHAT IS QUALITY? A quality can be defined as a fuzzy linguistic variable since quality can be very subjective. What is of a high quality to someone might not be a high quality to another. It can be defined with respect to an attribute such as cost or reliability. It is a degree of membership of an attribute or a characteristic that a product or software can or should have. For example, a product should be reliable, or a product should be both reliable and useable, or a product should be reliable or repairable. Similarly, software should be affordable, efficient, and effective [1]. 1.2 WHAT IS RELIABILITY? The IEEE defines reliability as “The ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time.” [2] 1.3 RELIABILITY AS A QUALITY ATTRIBUTE ISO 9126 defines six quality characteristics, one of which is reliability. IEEE STD. 982.2-1988 states “A software reliability management program requires the establishment of a balanced set of user quality objectives, and identification of intermediate quality objectives that will assist in achieving the user quality objectives” [3]. Since reliability is an attribute of quality, it can be concluded that software reliability depends on high quality software. 1.4 COST AS A QUALITY ATTRIBUTE Quality is always deemed to have a direct relationship to cost – the higher the quality standards, the higher the cost. Quality may in fact have an inverse relationship with cost in that deciding to meet high quality standards at the beginning of the project/operation may ultimately reduce maintenance and troubleshooting costs in the long term. 1.5 WHY SOFTWARE PROCESSES? Software processes enable effective communication among users, developers, managers, customers, researchers, and public authority and commission industry. They enhance management’s understanding, provide a precise basis for process automation, and facilitate personnel mobility and Process-reuse