CORE SPICE Delivering Safety-Critical Projects Under Pressure

Safety-critical development projects are expected to move fast and still get everything right: functional safety, cybersecurity, a growing list of standards and regulations, product quality, and tight delivery dates. Most teams struggle with this seemingly conflicting set of project constraints. This book argues that this conflict is solvable, and shows how projects can be organized to meet those constraints.

CORE SPICE is a coaching framework for make-to-order development projects, introduced here in book form for the first time. It rests on a small number of principles, a project-centric role model with clear end-to-end ownership, a set of lightweight strategy documents called Approaches that replace the process handbook, and five Effectiveness Accelerators that keep a project moving both fast and safe. CORE SPICE complements Automotive SPICE, ISO 26262 (functional safety), and ISO/SAE 21434 (cybersecurity). It is not a replacement for those standards. Instead, it is a working approach that helps a project meet those expectations while reducing bureaucracy.

Drawing on more than two decades of process improvement and turnaround work with automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers in Germany, the United States, Japan, China, and Australia, the author explains how to start a project right at Kickoff, how to choose the traceability approach that best serves the project’s needs, how to track progress effectively by features and product quality, and how to recover a project that has already drifted. Two anonymized real-world turnarounds and a chapter on passing the Automotive SPICE assessment show how the framework works under real pressure.

The book is written for project leads, technical leads, and senior engineers who are responsible for delivering safety-critical systems, and for the quality, process, and engineering managers who set the conditions they work in. Readers familiar with Automotive SPICE and ISO 26262 will find a practitioner’s perspective on making them work. Readers new to the standards will find it accessible and easy to follow.

Roman Mildner is the founder of United Mentors GmbH near Cologne, Germany. In more than thirty years of software and systems development, he has worked in nearly every role of the V-model on safety-critical automotive projects up to ASIL D. Since 2004, he has prepared organizations in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia for Automotive SPICE assessments and has recovered distressed projects under production pressure. He originated CORE SPICE.