Mapping automotive SPICE and ISO/TS 16949:2009: achieving higher maturity & capability levels

As usual, when planning to improve a process, an organization needs to compare the current version ('as-is') with the new, desired one ('to-be'). The possible content for such improvement comes from comparisons and mappings with similar processes kept from different sources. In the ICT arena such kind of studies are quite frequent but not always done for covering all models, for instance in the Automotive field. Again, often such comparisons have been done between not directly comparable elements (e.g. any management system standard as ISO 9001 is a requirement model, while maturity models such as CMMI or ISO/IEC 15504 represent process meta-models, with a different aim and contents). The aim of this paper is to provide a new mapping between AutomotiveSPICE (A-SPICE) and the ISO 9001 norm for the Automotive sector (ISO/TS 16494:2009). This new mapping could be to provide tips for giving contents to ISO clauses but directly from A-SPICE, for more valuable improvement projects.