Automotive SPICE® has been developed by consensus of the car manufacturers within the Automotive Special Interest Group (SIG) of the joint Procurement Forum/SPICE User Group under the Automotive SPICE® initiative.

As the complexity of automotive products has increased exponentially over the last years, modern luxury vehicle now comprise as many as 150+ Electronic Control Units (ECUs). With days to come, the increase in functionality will get more and more challenging as moderns car are turning out to be complex software systems. This also leads to various challenges in automotive software development in terms of requirements, design, testing, management, quality, configuration etc.

In this scenario, organizations need to have a robust process approach while dealing with automotive software development projects. Automotive SPICE® is such a model, which defines processes and best practices for embedded software development. Automotive SPICE® is developed by experts of the automotive industry which contains the processes (best practices) for automotive industry. Automotive SPICE® is a trademark of VDA (Verband der Automobilindustrie – Association Of Automotive Industry).

Major OEMs has agreed to set Automotive SPICE® as the standard process model for their development as well as a means of qualifying their suppliers and assessing the risks associated with those suppliers. Often, they are required to achieve a certain capability level in selected processes, a criteria to be fulfilled before winning a contract. Typically, assessments are performed by OEMs or consulting organizations to ensure the status of suppliers to ensure they quality for levels are desired.

intacs™ is a non profit organization that was set up in response to requests from industry to ensure high-quality assessor qualification in the worldwide community for Automotive SPICE® assessment according to ISO/IEC 33000 series. Its aim is to setting training and certification standards for Automotive SPICE® assessors and other SPICE® models. intacs™ is the scheme accepted by the automotive industry and the HIS / VDA AK 13 (working group responsible for defining process requirements for car manufacturers and n-tier suppliers).
If you want to, or already deal with customers needing Automotive SPICE®, you should understand, implement, and follow Automotive SPICE® as the standard process model.

Automotive SPICE®, is two dimensional model having Processes in one dimension and Capability levels in another. There are Thirty Two processes grouped in to three process category, eight process groups as shown on process dimension, and 6 (practically 5) capability levels as shown on Capability Dimension.
The Automotive SPICE® Process Reference Model (PRM) is used by OEMs when performing an assessment to assess their suppliers, or by OEMs and Suppliers to assess their own processes for improvement and benchmarking.
The first version of Automotive SPICE was published in May, 2005. Since then it has been one of the most popular and trusted model among Automotive OEMs for implementation and assessment. OEMs have set their requirements against achievement of ASPICE processes. The latest version is Automotive SPICE version 3.1 released on November 11, 2017

QMGC provides Automotive SPICE® Training, Gap Analysis and Consulting services involving experts.