Integrating Joint Reviews with automotive SPICE assessments results

The continuous changes in customer requirements as well as the ever-increasing market-driven demand for innovation make automotive soft- ware projects success strongly dependent on the customer-supplier communica- tion and co-operation throughout the software life cycle. Joint reviews and software process assessments (mostly performed according to the Automotive SPICE model) are popular means used by car manufacturers and their suppliers of software-intensive components to face such a situation. Often these two re- source-consuming techniques are performed separately, without mutual support or interaction. This paper presents an approach to integrating joint reviews with software process assessment results. The effectiveness of joint reviews depends on the degree of car manufacturer's knowledge and understanding of the sup- plier's way of proceeding in software development. We show how assessment results can be used as input to joint reviews to support car manufacturers in conducting joint reviews effectively.