The history of automotive HMI development reveals that the development of new interactive in-car functionalities (such as infotainment systems) has often been influenced by upcoming new technologies that customers got used to in their daily lives. Examples of such technologies include the first in-car radio, which was introduced around 1922, or the first in-car phone, which was introduced around 1952. Today, a car without such functionalities is hard to imagine and the automotive industry is aiming to develop and integrate more and more innovative functionality to stay competitive on the market. The development of such functions is motivated by the construction of safer, more efficient, and more comfortable vehicle systems. Current trends in the area of in-car infotainment applications include, for instance, Internet-based applications or social network applications, whereas extendable, hybrid, adaptive, or even personalized HMI are emerging as future trends. Not only technologies have evolved throughout history, the development processes themselves have also been adapted continuously due to the challenges the automotive industry had to face with new technologies. Thus, the authors have summarized their experiences, their knowledge, and the results of literature studies in this article which covers the history of automotive HMI development from the past in 1922 to the present with an outlook on upcoming trends for future automotive user interfaces.

Modern human machine interfaces provide a sophisticated structure and logic to ease their use. As they are the only mean to control the system behind, extensive testing and highest quality is required in the automotive domain. A common testing approach in literature is to derive the necessary test cases from a formal model. However, redundancy and data dependency still hinder manual modeling in the industrial context. In this paper, we present preliminary work to address these obstacles. As a first step, we combined depictive state charts with reusable programming code. We modeled parts of the graphical user interface of a state-of-the-art infotainment system and successfully generated a test suite that covers our testing goal to reach each button at least once.

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.