A real time measure of software system families

Software systems with inherent real time characteristics have become the driving force in many areas of technology like the automotive sector. Control functions of cars, driver assistance as well as systems for information and entertainment are accomplished by software driven control units. Due to the high complexity and development effort of real time systems, these resources have to be reused. Software system families are a promising solution to gain a cost reduction by reusing common software assets in different variants of an automobile. To support the economic management of this development approach we need software metrics to estimate the effort of building embedded software system families. Techniques of size measurement and cost estimation for software system families are highly insufficient in general and do not exist for the automotive domain. Therefore this article describes a conglomerate of innovative metrics to analyze a realtime perspective of embedded software system families in the automotive domain. These size metrics calculate an unadjusted measure of software driven control units to indicate and estimate their development costs.