On the Practices of Autonomous Systems Development: Survey-based Empirical Findings

Autonomous systems have gained an important role in many industry domains and are beginning to change everyday life. However, due to dynamically emerging applications and often proprietary constraints, there is a lack of information about the practice of developing autonomous systems. This paper presents the first part of the longitudinal study focused on establishing state-of-the-practice, identifying and quantifying the challenges and benefits, identifying the processes and standards used, and exploring verification and validation (V&V) practices used for the development of autonomous systems. The results presented in this paper are based on data about software systems that have autonomous functionality and may employ model-based software engineering (MBSwE) and reuse. These data were collected using an anonymous online survey that was administered in 2019 and were provided by experts with experience in the development of autonomous systems and / or the use of MBSwE. Our current work is focused on repeating the survey to collect more recent data and discover how the development of autonomous systems has evolved over time.