“A polished report may fool the assessor, but the car on the road will always tell the truth.” 🚗🗣️
Everyone knows the ritual. Management asks for a status. Teams scramble. Templates are populated, slide decks multiplied 📊, "evidence" appears like magic the week before the assessment. The dashboard goes green ✅. The smiles come out. And somewhere down the line, a customer discovers a problem the slides never mentioned. 😟
That pattern matters because ASPICE is meant to be a flashlight 🔦, not stage lighting 🎭. If the light only ever hits a polished prop, you confuse performance with safety. This episode is about the difference between paperwork that comforts management and work products that protect customers.
🧾 Evidence: The Misunderstood Villain 😈
Say "evidence" and people picture folders no one reads. That's the misconception: evidence is not bureaucratic decoration. It's the trail engineering naturally leaves behind when work is real. 🛤️
Requirements, bug reports 🐛, design notes, test logs, code reviews, change requests: these are not "for ASPICE". They are the by-products of building something. ASPICE simply asks you to make them visible, consistent, and connected so anyone can follow the story from need to proof. 📖➡️✅
Evidence doesn't live in binders, it lives in the work. 💻 (Gemini generated image)
⛓️ Work Products: The Chain That Proves You Built It 🔗
A concrete example beats a thousand slides. A credible chain looks like this:
Here's the requirement 📋 (origin: customer need). Here's the review where we debated options 💬. Here's the design decision we made 🎨. Here's the configuration we built ⚙️. Here's the test that exercises that behavior 🧪. Here's the verification report that closes the loop ✅.
Each step explains why the next exists. That cause → effect chain is what turns an artifact into evidence. If any link is missing, or only assembled two days before the assessor arrives, the story collapses. 📉
Real evidence connects decisions to tests: a simple story anyone can follow. 🧭 (Gemini generated image)
🎬 Show, Don’t Tell: How Assessments Actually Work 🤫➡️🎥
Assessors don’t want rehearsed speeches; they want the laptop-open moment 💻:
- Pull up the requirement.
- Show the email or ticket where it came from 📧.
- Show the design note where trade-offs were recorded.
- Pull the test log that proves the behavior.
- Show the verification note that closes the loop.
If your engineers can do that in ten minutes, you’ve got practice. If they stumble and read from slides, you’ve got theater. 🎭
A good liaison — one person who knows the project and the mapping between work products and the ASPICE requirements — transforms the assessment from an interrogation into a demonstration. Not to game the assessor, but to let truth be visible. 👁️
🧴 The Snake-Oil Playbook (and Why It’s Dangerous) ☠️
Where pressure meets fear, shortcuts appear. Common tricks:
- “Write-and-file” processes nobody follows. 📁
- Tests that were never run but have fabricated logs. 🤥
- Findings marked “resolved” with the promise “we’ll do it later.” ➡️⏳
- Shopping for an assessor who prefers comfortable narratives. 🛒
These are not clever hacks; they are deferred failures. Fake green dashboards keep management happy, until the customer discovers they were never the point. 😠
The real cost of fake evidence is not an audit finding. It’s a catastrophic field failure that reads like a mystery to everyone who trusted the slides. ‼️
Quick fixes look appealing - until the product shows otherwise. 💔 (Gemini generated image)
🛠️ Practical Moves: Make Evidence a Side Effect of Doing Good Work ♻️
If you want real evidence that survives scrutiny, do these simple things:
- Build evidence into the flow: link tickets, commits, test runs, and reports automatically. 🔗
- Use your tools for tracing (version control, test runners) rather than ad-hoc Excel dumps. 🛠️
- Teach the why: explain why each artifact exists so people produce it for the right reason. 🧠
- Appoint one calm liaison who knows both the project and assessment logic. 👤
- Insist on blamelessness. Honesty only surfaces when people aren’t punished for truth. 🛡️
- Augment with AI, not replace with it. Use AI to assist in finding inconsistencies, surfacing missing links, or pre-sorting evidence. But don’t let it become a substitute for human judgment — the road tests reality, not algorithms. 🤖➡️🧠
These aren’t bureaucratic burdens. They are pragmatic habits (with or without AI) that turn assessments into improvements, not theater. 🎭➡️📈
🔑 Takeaway: The Road Won’t Lie 🛣️✅
Polish your slides if you like. But remember: a dashboard that looks good and a product that fails are not mutually exclusive — regrettably, they often travel together. ASPICE becomes useful only when evidence reflects reality, not when reality is edited to fit a story. ✍️
If you want ASPICE to protect customers, make evidence a natural output of engineering — not a last-minute prop. Show, don’t tell. The car will tell the truth; make sure what it tells is backed by substance. 💪
🔖 If you found this perspective helpful, follow me for more insights on software quality, testing strategies, and ASPICE in practice.
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