Is automotive SPICE Suitable to assess product lines-based software process?

Software Product Lines is a popular development scheme in Automotive. Many software suppliers of car manufacturers have established in last years Software Product Lines frameworks in order to improve the reuse and quality of their software-intensive automobiles' components. At the same time Automotive SPICE has become a very popular standard for software process evaluation and improvement, mainly in the European automotive industry. Although Automotive SPICE has been developed with the aim at making the general ISO/IEC 15504 standard more suitable for automotive applications, where it is being extensively applied, yet it presents some aspects that make it not completely suitable for the SPL approach. This fact prevents full exploitation of the benefits of adopting SPICE, as SPL-based projects are mostly applied in the automotive application domain. In this paper we discuss the drawbacks of Automotive SPICE when applied in SPL-based contexts to identify the related risks and their mitigation policies.