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Electronic control units and on-board networks for automotive applications cover a big variety of functions that in many cases are responsible of safetycritical behavior of the vehicle. Safety needs and goals claim that the software involved in such functions be designed by adopting opportune methods and practices. The paper presents a survey on most of these practices in the light of emerging standards.

The ever-increasing pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) not only is determining radical changes in everyone's life-style, in the social organizations, and in the economic dynamics, but it is causing relevant direct and indirect effects on the environment as well. One of the aspects not yet sufficiently addressed in literature is the sustainability of the software lifecycle. In this paper, we focus on the sustainability management of software development projects. In the practice, software development projects are managed by considering principally parameters as time, costs and quality of work products. We propose a methodological approach aimed at identifying sustainability indicators to be used in project management to set up sustainability objectives for a software development project, to control their achievement during the project itself and, possibly, to adopt corrective actions to maintain the project aligned with them.The availability of such sustainability indicators may contribute to reduce the carbon footprint of the activities performed in software development projects as well as to speed-up the development of a green culture in organizations developing software.

Car makers depend more and more on the software they acquire, which has forced them to address the issue of assessing the quality of the acquired software. European car makers approach this issue by checking the capability of the suppliers' software process. Fiat Auto, since the year 2001, has been taking proactive actions to address the situation. The basic strategy has been to set up criteria for qualifying software suppliers based on measuring the capability of their software processes. In this article, this qualification mechanism is described in detail. The innovative aspect of the approach is to consider the results of a SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) assessment as one of the contractual requirements to let a software company become eligible for software supplies. As a positive effect, the assessments made on the software process have allowed Fiat Auto to select suppliers on the basis of some objective and quantitative evidence of their level of quality. In addition, this initiative has been giving Fiat Auto a deeper knowledge of the way its suppliers produce software: this is a fundamental step to building up the capability of monitoring and driving the software projects in a collaborative effort with the suppliers, which can benefit from having possible improvement opportunities pointed out. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.