Embracing software process improvement in automotive through PISA Model

Vehicles innovation is principally driven by electronics components and software that play today a predominant role for the vehicle's functions. Because the quality of on-board automotive electronic systems is strongly dependent on the quality of their development practices, car-makers and suppliers proactively focused on improvement of technical and organizational processes. In this setting, several reference standards for the assessment and improvement of automotive electronics processes and projects have been conceived and used in the last decade. Although the effects of the application of them in automotive industry have been generally positive, getting compliance in the short period may represent, in some contexts, a target hardly achievable, or even a chimera. In this context, a novel scheme addressing both project evaluation and process improvement and targeting a hand-on approach for the practitioners has been recently developed starting from the analysis of practitioners needs and success factors in the software process improvement. This scheme is named Process Improvement Scheme for Automotive (PISA Model). The structure and contents of the PISA Model is described in this paper.