The use of software reference architectures plays a fundamental role in software development, as it could bring several benefits such as providing means to design applications’ software architectures with higher productivity and quality. However, many organizations still find scarce the existing empirical evidence about the benefits and drawbacks of software reference architectures. Organizations need such evidence to make informed decisions whether or not to adopt a software reference architecture for the development and maintenance of software applications. In this context, this paper aims to gather evidence on AUTOSAR, a mature and accepted software reference architecture for automotive applications used worldwide by more than 180 organizations. We designed and executed a web-based survey addressed to practitioners with experience in using AUTOSAR. We obtained 51 valid responses. The survey results indicate that the most popular benefits of AUTOSAR are standardization (88%), reuse (80%) and interoperability (51%) whereas its most important drawbacks are complexity (65%), initial investment (59%) and learning curve (51%). The respondents of the survey also gave directions to handle the major drawbacks of AUTOSAR, such as the need of a tool environment to improve its usability and handle its complexity, and the need of more stable releases of AUTOSAR to decrease the cost of migrating among versions.

Peer Reviewed