The Question That Cannot Be Answered

The ASPICE Cost Fallacy — Engineering Economics at Scale (Part 1 of 4)

The Familiar Question

What is the cost of ASPICE?

If you work in automotive development, you’ve heard this question many times.

In steering committees.
In transformation kick-offs.
In quiet hallway conversations, usually followed by a sigh.

It sounds reasonable. Engineering is about trade-offs, and cost is one of them.

And yet, after years of discussion, the answers remain unsatisfying:

• too anecdotal,
• too defensive,
• or too perfectly aligned with whoever is speaking.

This isn’t because people are dishonest.

It’s because the question itself is flawed.

Not politically.
Structurally.

A reasonable question, built on unstable ground. (Gemini generated image)

The Missing Control Group

Cost discussions assume comparison.

But here, the comparison does not exist.

There is no experiment where:

• the same product,
• built by the same team,
• under the same constraints,
• for the same market,

is developed once with ASPICE and once without ASPICE.

What we actually compare are:

• different organizations,
• with different histories,
• different pressures,
• different levels of discipline.

We then attribute the outcome to “ASPICE”.

That is not measurement.
It is attribution by convenience.

ASPICE is blamed or praised for effects that were never isolated from the system it operates in.

The Binary Compliance Myth

Even if such a comparison were possible, another problem appears immediately.

“Developed with ASPICE” is not a binary state.

There is:

• partial adoption,
• selective interpretation,
• documentation without lived behavior,
• lived behavior without formal evidence.

Is Capability Level 1 “with ASPICE”?
What about Level 2 in some areas and Level 1 in others?
What about teams that work rigorously but document late?

Without a clear threshold, statements like

“This project was done with ASPICE”

lose analytical meaning.

They become labels, not descriptions.

And cost discussions built on labels do not survive scrutiny.

When Process Cost Is Confused with Visibility

At this point, the tone often shifts.

People say:

• “ASPICE adds overhead.”
• “ASPICE slows us down.”
• “ASPICE makes everything heavier.”

But look closely at what is being counted as “cost.”

Often it is:

• making decisions explicit,
• documenting assumptions,
• tracing dependencies,
• testing earlier instead of later.

In other words: making work visible.

Visibility feels expensive because it removes ambiguity.
And ambiguity is comfortable.

ASPICE does not necessarily create new problems.
It makes existing ones harder to ignore — and earlier to deal with.

That difference matters.
What feels like cost is often just exposure. (Gemini generated image)

Why the Discomfort Persists

If ASPICE merely exposed inefficiencies, wouldn’t organizations eventually welcome it?

Not necessarily.

Early exposure has a psychological cost:

• problems appear sooner,
• effort is required before visible progress,
• accountability becomes harder to diffuse.

Late exposure, by contrast, is often:

• externalized (suppliers, customers),
• normalized (“that’s just how it goes”),
• absorbed as emergency work.

Both cost money.
Only one feels uncomfortable early.

When people ask about the “cost of ASPICE”, they are often reacting not to expense — but to timing.

So What Are We Really Asking?

If:

• there is no valid control group,
• compliance is not binary,
• and much of the “cost” is actually early visibility,

then the original question collapses.

“What is the cost of ASPICE?” is not a measurable question.

It is a signal.

A signal that something feels heavier, earlier, more explicit than before.

The real question underneath is different.

And answering that requires shifting perspective —
from snapshots to lifecycles,
from immediate effort to downstream consequences.

That’s where we go next.

Bridge to Part 2

In Part 2, we’ll look at why ASPICE genuinely feels expensive, why that feeling isn’t wrong — and why it still leads many organizations to the wrong conclusion.

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📚 Series Navigator: The ASPICE Cost Fallacy — Engineering Economics at Scale
Overview: A structured exploration of the question everyone asks but few answer: “What is the cost of ASPICE?” This mini-series reframes the conversation from naive accounting to economic resilience in automotive development, unpacking complexity, risk, and decision-making.

• Part 1: The Question That Cannot Be Answered
• Part 2: The Short-Term Illusion vs. The Long-Term Reality
• Part 3: ASPICE Is Not About Saving Money
• Part 4: Stop Asking About Cost

🔖 Follow this series for more insights on software quality, testing strategies, and ASPICE in practice.

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