Software Process Improvement and Lifecycle Models in Automotive Industry

Abstract: The quality of a product depends on the quality of the underlying process is a well known fact. Software development organizations have been struggling to decrease their cost, increase their ROI, reduce time-to-market, and enhance the quality of their products. This all depends upon the improvement in the processes they are following inside their organizations. A number of software process improvement models exist in market, e.g., CMMI, SPICE and Automotive SPICE. But before an organization can improve its development and management processes, it is very important to know whether it is following the right processes. There exist a number of software development process models, mainly categorized into Traditional and Agile, which provide the step-by-step guidance to develop and manage the software projects.The current thesis presents a study of software process improvement models in automotive industry, their weaknesses and strengths and presents a comparison of how do they relate to each other. This thesis also explores some software development models which are more famous in automotive industry, and the applicability of process improvement models in conjunction with the Agile software development models. A case study was performed at an automotive software supplier organization to investigate the experience of combining Agile practices with organization’s company-tailored software development model that was incorporating Automotive SPICE standards.