GUI Failures of In-Vehicle Infotainment: Analysis, Classification, Challenges, and Capabilities

With the growth of complexity in modern automotive infotainment systems, graphical user interfaces become more and more sophisticated, and this leads to various challenges in software testing. Due to the enormous amount of possible interactions, test engineers have to decide, which test aspects to focus on. In this paper, we examine what types of failures can be found in graphical user interfaces of automotive infotainment systems, and how frequently they occur. In total, we have analyzed more than 3,000 failures, found and fixed during the development of automotive infotainment systems at Audi, Bosch, and Mercedes-Benz. We applied the Orthogonal Defect Classification for categorizing these failures. The difficulties we faced when applying this classification led us to formulating requirements for an own classification scheme. On this basis, we have developed a hierarchical classification scheme for failures grounded on common concepts in software engineering, such as Model-View-Controller and Screens. The results of the application of our classification show that 62% of the reports describe failures related to behavior, 25% of the reports describe failures related to contents, 6% of the reports describe failures related to design, and 7% of the reports describe failures to be categorized. An outlined capability of the results is the support for fault seeding approaches which leads to the challenge of tracing the found failures to the correspondent faults. Keywords-domain specific failures; GUI based software; invehicle infotainment system; failure classification; fault seeding.