In automotive development, two frameworks dominate the conversation: ASPICE and ISO 26262. Both claim to safeguard quality and safety — but too often they live in silos. Are they natural allies, or awkward strangers forced to share the same project space? Let's find out.
🍽️ Appetizer: Management's Magic Trick
There's a neat trick many leaders have perfected:
Announce unwavering commitment to quality and safety, then quietly reward teams for producing checklists that look nice in audits.
The result? Fake compliance. Glossy decks. And — no surprise — product recalls.
Because you can fool auditors. But you can't fool physics.
Audit magic doesn't stop recalls. (Gemini generated image)
🎭 Audit Theater vs. Reality
Last episode we exposed the "PowerPoint Project" — organizations winning audits while losing reality.
Here, the stakes escalate: When ASPICE (process quality) and ISO 26262 (functional safety) drift apart, audit theater doesn't just waste money. It may lead to injury.
Audit theater hides the real story. (Gemini generated image)
🧬 Common DNA — The Golden Thread
Both ASPICE and ISO 26262 demand rigor, evidence, and traceability.
The difference? One speaks about every project. The other about safety-related items.
The overlap is real, but too often ignored.
This is where the Golden Thread comes in:
From Hazard → Safety Goal → SW Requirement → Test Evidence, one line of traceability must weave through both ASPICE's skeleton and ISO 26262's nervous system.
Concrete example:
Hazard: Unintended acceleration → Safety Goal: Limit torque → SW Requirement: Torque monitoring → Test: Inject fault, verify shutdown.
Traceability is the lifeline. (Gemini generated image)
⚔️ The Clash — Scope Mismatch
Here lies the rift:
- ASPICE: All projects, every component.
- ISO 26262: Only safety-related items.
Without intelligent tailoring (remember Ep.6), organizations either:
- Apply safety rigor everywhere → paralyzing bureaucracy.
- Or isolate safety into a parallel universe → disconnected from real engineering.
Neither approach works in isolation. Combine them — and you get the worst of both worlds.
🐍 Snake-Oil Alert: Duplication Dealers
Beware the vendors and consultants who say:
"Don't worry, just build one ASPICE process and copy it for safety."
Sounds efficient? It's toxic.
Duplication doesn't strengthen safety — it undermines it. It creates the perfect conditions for audit theater: two checklists satisfied, zero connections made.
Duplication dealers profit, engineers suffer. (Gemini generated image)
🚩 Red Flags in Organizations
When ASPICE and ISO 26262 are treated as separate kingdoms, the cracks don't take long to show. The warning signs are usually not hidden — they're right there in how the organization structures its processes and responsibilities.
Some of the most common red flags include:
- Separate process handbooks for ASPICE and Safety.
- Parallel toolchains with no cross-links.
- Safety managers acting as "auditors-in-chief" instead of integrators.
- Reviews done twice — once for process, once for safety — with different results.
These may look like "good governance" at first glance, but in reality, they create duplication, confusion, and blind spots. What should be one unified chain of evidence becomes a patchwork of disconnected documents.
🛠️ Practical Moves
How to stop the madness:
- Map once, use twice 🗺️ — Create one traceability chain, tagged for both ASPICE and Safety.
- Audit the links, not the binders 📎 — Evidence must show continuity, not parallel paperwork.
- Unify reviews 🔍 — Requirements, code, and tests get one integrated review, not fragmented sessions.
- Role clarity 👥 — Safety isn't the job of the "safety manager". It's a property of the engineering work itself. Every engineer is a safety engineer.
🧠 Case in Point
A real-world failure:
- ASPICE audit: "Green".
- ISO 26262 audit: "Green".
- Reality: Safety goal not traced into actual implementation.
The car's microcontroller doesn't care how pretty your slide deck looks. The driver? Even less.
Audits can't save you from physics. (Gemini generated image)
🎯 Takeaway
ASPICE and Functional Safety are not strangers. They are siblings.
One is the skeleton. The other the nervous system. Together, they form a living, breathing organism.
Split them apart, and you don't get double rigor — you get double blindness.
The only cure: weave the Golden Thread through both, and build a culture where safety is not a department, but the essence of engineering itself.
🔜 Coming next: Episode 10 — Suppliers & ASPICE: Trust, Verify, and Collaborate.
🔖 If you found this perspective helpful, follow me for more insights on software quality, testing strategies, and ASPICE in practice.
© 2025 Abdul Osman. All rights reserved. You are welcome to share the link to this article on social media or other platforms. However, reproducing the full text or republishing it elsewhere without permission is prohibited.
Top comments (0)