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In the fall of 2005, the Automotive Industry established the SAE J2746 Software Assessment Repository (SAR) Task Force with the purpose of achieving significant improvements in software quality and reductions in cost throughout the automotive supply chain. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and International Standards Organization (ISO) have developed specific guidelines for software development processes that have been embraced throughout the supply chain in the manufacturing of products used in automotive applications. These requirements are published internationally as ISO 15504-series (i.e., SPICE [1] and AutoSPICE [2]), and CMMI v1.x by SEI [3] in the USA. An initiative of the SAE J2746 Task Force was to develop a global scheme for the use of assessment results performed by registrars, based on the CMMI/SPICE standards.

Demanding competition among vehicles in today’s market has led to very similar feature content across vehicles in the same segment. The distinguishing characteristics therefore must be how the features are accessed and utilized by the occupants, or more clearly the Human Machine Interface (HMI). Designing embedded products for this type of automotive market presents several interesting challenges and significant system level opportunities. Challenges arise in how to effectively separate the HMI from the actual functionality of the electronic module. Separation of presentation and control from algorithm and computation is a mature computer science domain. Appling this strategy to the embedded products in vehicles provides the challenge of how to uncouple the HMI software within a single module. In addition, the opportunities for how to re-deploy the HMI software within that same module or into a set of distributed modules will impact product reusability and development costs.

The rapid growth of electronic feature content within the vehicle continues to challenge the automotive industry. Customers want cutting edge consumer electronics features in a vehicle before the features are obsolete. However, automotive manufacturers continue to struggle with introducing new features into vehicles before they become obsolete to the customer. The ability for automotive manufacturers to seamlessly upgrade existing products with new and improved products continues to plague the automotive industry. Vehicles traditionally take 4 plus years to design and manufacture. Automotive manufacturers need to plan consumer electronics features early, but not actually integrate those into the vehicle until late in the design cycle, possibly on the production line. This would help facilitate providing the most recent features.

The rapid growth of vehicle feature content continues to challenge automotive designers. The total vehicle feature content seriously impacts the manufacturing complexity of any single vehicle. Traditional strategies for introducing new features into high-content luxury vehicles before moving the feature into economy vehicles have been undermined by the fast moving consumer electronics field. The challenge for automotive OEM and Tier 1 suppliers is to optimize the vehicle architecture in order to provide more efficient means of introducing features expediently and efficiently. Therefore, any production vehicle's Electrical, Electronic, & Software (EES) architecture must successfully support modular sourcing, modular assembly, global manufacturing schemes, cost and weight issues.