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 and owner of United Mentors GmbH, a specialist consultancy in Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne, Germany. With more than thirty years in software and systems development, he has worked across the full V-model—as developer, requirements manager, software architect, test manager, quality manager, and project manager—on safety-critical projects up to ASIL D for leading automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, and in other industries such as telecommunications, life sciences, software vendors, and logistics.

Automotive SPICE has been part of his work since 2004, when a first CMMI engagement led him into process improvement. In the two decades since, he has taken organizations from level 0 to capability levels 2 and 3 across the full VDA scope in Germany, Australia, the United States, China, and Japan; prepared their teams for OEM assessments; and guided them through the assessments. He knows the model from both sides: as the consultant who builds the evidence and as the project manager who delivers the product. CORE SPICE grew out of that practitioner’s perspective.

He has recovered distressed projects under production pressure without compromising safety compliance and continues to support turnaround projects as a project manager and Team Capability Coach. He holds a master’s degree in computer science and economics from RWTH Aachen and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).

Roman Mildner originated CORE SPICE, the coaching framework described in this book. He is a co-author of Car IT Reloaded: Disruption in the Car Industry (Springer, 2025) and author of Car IT kompakt (Springer, 2015). He writes on project delivery and safety-critical development at projectcrunch.com.