Controlling software acquisition: is supplier's software process capability determination enough?

Innovation in automotive is principally due to the market-driven demand of electronic devices on the vehicles. Car manufacturers usually acquire software-intensive components from different suppliers, and they need to carefully manage such acquisitions to avoid losses in terms of time and quality of the final product. In the last decade, in Europe, many car manufacturers adopted Automotive SPICE-based mechanisms to face such a situation. In this paper we discuss the results achieved by adopting such approaches, and we show that the overall software supplier management would be improved by means of a better usage of the information Automotive SPICE assessments are able to provide.