Measuring supplier's capability to set up contractual clauses

Car makers depend more and more on the software they acquire, that forced them to address the issue of assessing the quality of the acquired software. A common trend of European Car Makers to approach this issue is to focus onby checking the capability of the suppliers' software process. FIAT Auto, since year 2001, has been taking pro-active actions to address the situation. The basic strategy has been to set up criteria for qualifying software suppliers based on measuring the capability of their software process. In this paper, this qualification mechanism is described in detail. The innovative aspect of the approach is to consider the results of a SPICE (ISO 15504) assessment as one of the contractual requirements to let a software company be eligible for software supplies. As a positive effect, the assessments made on the software process, allow FIAT Auto to select suppliers on the basis of some objective and quantitative evidence of their level of quality. In addition, this initiative gave has been giving FIAT a deeper knowledge of the way its suppliers produce software: this is a fundamental step to building up the capability of monitoring and driving the software projects in a collaborative effort with the suppliers, which can benefit from having possible improvement opportunities pointed out.