From CL0 to CL3 – in Under a Year
At a major premium automotive manufacturer, two bachelor's students developed a software component that was later used in series production. Seven years later—after the component had made its way into multiple ECUs across all vehicles, apps, and infrastructure—the quality department caught wind of it and arranged for the project to be handed over to a software development company, with the goal of making the software "Automotive SPICE® CL3 capable."
Now, a CL is something an organization or project organization achieves—not the software product itself—but my client took on the assignment and started from zero. There were: zero documented requirements, zero design documents, zero percent unit test coverage, roughly 60,000 unevaluated MISRA deviations, and an unconsolidated list of about 70 change requests.
A year after my client took over the project, it became clear that no SPICE assessment had ever been conducted—and in a VDA 6.3 audit, the client received a warning shot in the form of a poor C-supplier rating. That's when I came into the picture as a young Provisional Assessor.
Within four months, we were able to raise the follow-up VDA 6.3 audit to a very good B-supplier rating. In the first SPICE assessment, virtually all processes were CL0. We defined a modified development lifecycle for cases where the source code already exists and everything else is developed around it afterward.
Using the Axivion Bauhaus Suite, we were able to define a target architecture and identify where the existing implementation deviated from it. The tool also came with a continuous test environment, which we used to define and monitor different quality targets for legacy code versus new lines of code.
These quality targets were agreed jointly with the client (project management and quality department) and defined as project objectives. Less than a year after the first assessment, we were able to demonstrate CL2 across all processes, and CL3 in several of them.
In later projects, the client can now achieve CL2 to CL3 in the very first assessment, right from the start, with entirely new project teams. This is the result of suitable processes that the client—not I—developed, with my support.