Experiences in managing an automotive requirements engineering process

The specification volume for all software-based systems that are built in a modem car has passed the 20,000 pages mark. Even for a single component, we find specification documents comprising several hundred pages. Clearly, such specification documents cannot be created and changed simply and quickly. We hence need a systematic process to elicit and maintain, negotiate and validate all requirements, i.e. a proper requirements engineering process. In this paper, we present an example for such an automotive requirements engineering process and the instruments we employed to manage this process. The experiences are drawn from projects at Daimler-Chrysler Passenger Car Development. The paper sketches the requirements engineering process used, the core management instruments deployed, e.g. a feature list, and observations gained in utilizing this process.