One decade of software process assessments in automotive: a retrospective analysis

Automotive is an application domain that witnessed a fast technology evolution in the last decade. Such an evolution determined new challenges and consequent technical and cultural changes in the way automobiles are designed and produced. In particular, to face the ever increasing number and complexity of software-intensive components the car manufacturers adopted different countermeasures, as the use of software process assessments (mainly based on the ISO/IEC 15504 standard) in software suppliers' management. After almost a decade and hundreds of assessments performed world-wide, it is time to evaluate the effects obtained. In this paper the authors, on the basis of a extensive experience in leading software process assessment in automotive, describe the achievements and discuss the open issues to identify possible solutions.