A novel model for development project assessment in automotive

In the last two decades, automotive witnessed a continuous and unstoppable trend to innovation. 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, Automotive SPICE became a reference standard for the assessment and improvement of automotive electronics processes and projects. The effects of the application of Automotive SPICE in automotive industry have been substantially positive in terms of process awareness, possibility of benchmarking, development discipline, and incitement to improvement. Nevertheless, getting compliant in the short period to Automotive SPICE requirements may represent, in some contexts, a target hardly achievable, or even a chimera. In this paper we present a novel automotive-specific scheme for process evaluation and improvement. This scheme has been conceived taking into account the authors experience in automotive as Automotive SPICE principal assessors and it aims at setting up basic objectives in terms of process performance in terms of discipline, technical soundness and completeness in project deployment. The scheme is going to be validated by performing trials with real projects.