Automotive SPICE compliance in an Agile Software Development Process A case study on optimization of the work products

Abstract

Automotive SPICE is used in the automotive industry to comply with functional safety. This guideline uses the waterfall/v-cycle model for software development. However, automotive companies are shifting their way of working into iterative software production using agile methodologies. One of the remaining challenges that persists when combining these two development methodologies is ensuring the critical-safety of the work products with their corresponding documentation, as the Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe) used in large companies do not consider this. Therefore, this study takes a deeper look into the software processes of the Aurora team at Volvo Cars ART steering department to propose a new document management strategy that allows the combination of agile software development while still complying with A-SPICE. To achieve this, active observations and interviews were conducted for data collection. The creation of the adapted document management strategy shows that it is possible to adopt agile development practices in large-scale automotive companies and still comply with A-SPICE. Further studies should be conducted to adapt the document management strategy to other automotive companies, as well as to evaluate the short and longterm effects that the suggested document management strategy has on the software development process and the team.