“When I look at the software recalls of recent years, many of them seem to trace back to process failures early in development,” says Nitin Shah, a software process manager at a global automaker in Michigan. “By the time a defect reaches the field, the chance to catch it through process governance has largely passed.”

A modern vehicle depends on software for engine and transmission control, braking, battery management and driver assistance. Figures of 100 million lines of code or more per vehicle are often cited, and most of that code is written not by the carmaker but by a global network of Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers. Making sure all of it is built to one standard is slow, unglamorous work that rarely makes headlines until something goes wrong.

Shah has spent more than thirty years in automotive and industrial embedded systems, with a focus on software quality governance, supplier assessment and process compliance. His work covers both how his employer’s own engineers build software and how the suppliers behind its vehicle programs are assessed.

“A modern car contains software written by many different companies, and keeping all of it to one quality standard takes deliberate coordination,” he says. “That does not happen by itself. Somebody has to build that framework, apply it and close the gaps that surface.”

From embedded systems to process governance, Shah graduated in electrical engineering from Samrat Ashok Technological Institute (SATI), Vidisha, in 1995. After early roles in industrial electrical switchgear service and application software, he moved into embedded systems in 2000, working on real-time operating system software for defence electronics. In 2003 he joined KPIT in Pune. Over 18 years there, he moved from GCC open source, compilers, device-driver and unit-testing work for semiconductor clients into project management and was promoted to Associate Director, Delivery, in 2020. From 2014, he was based in Michigan supporting the powertrain software organisation of Chrysler, later FCA, where he was the North American contact for the global change-management process used by powertrain controls teams in North America, Europe and Latin America.

After 18 months as Software Process Manager at HL Mando America, he joined a global automaker in Michigan in January 2023.

“I started out writing embedded code, and that taught me what process quality really means,” he says. “You learn how things fail, and you see what happens when an assumption breaks at the hardware level. So, when I review a process now, I don’t just check boxes. I ask one question: would this catch the failure before it reaches the field?”

The standard the industry runs on

Automotive SPICE is the process-assessment model most widely used in the industry for software development. Published by the quality management centre of the German automotive association (VDA QMC), it rates how capable each process is on a scale from 0 to 5, across areas such as requirements, architecture, coding, testing and release. Assessors are certified through intacs, an international assessor certification scheme based in Germany.

Shah is a certified intacs Provisional Assessor for Automotive SPICE since late 2024 and has taken part in formal assessments alongside other certified assessors.

Setting a common bar for suppliers, Shah is a co-author, with colleagues, of internal process standards that set out how his employer assesses its software and electronics suppliers. They were updated in 2025 and 2026. Suppliers are expected to show that their development processes meet a defined level of Automotive SPICE capability, with the scope depending on the risk of the software they supply. A formal exception process exists for cases where a requirement cannot be met, so that deviations are recorded and decided deliberately instead of informally.

Shah also takes part in the company’s review of supplier exceptions and has contributed to internal guidance on how the company and its suppliers develop software together, as part of a wider effort to improve how software suppliers are managed.

“In a few exceptional cases the standard and its real-world implementation differ,” he says. “Decisions on exceptions, escalations and what counts as sufficient evidence are usually made internally.”

Making traceability measurable, Automotive SPICE requires that every requirement can be traced through design, code and testing. In large programs, that chain is easy to break and hard to see. Shah developed a traceability and validation approach that links each vehicle use case to its requirements, architecture, implementation work and test results, and made the status visible to program leadership and engineering teams through regularly updated dashboards covering requirements traceability, verification and validation status, and release readiness. A companion view tracks code-quality indicators such as coding-rule violations, compiler warnings, cyclomatic complexity, code duplication and coverage, CPU and memory footprint.

Over the period in which the dashboards were in use, requirement implementation and traceability coverage, and test pass rates, improved substantially across the programs using them.

“The biggest shift in my thinking was moving from periodic assessments to continuous visibility,” Shah says. “An assessment captures a team’s position at one point in time, while a dashboard tracking quality key performance indicators (KPIs) across active
programs shows their position today. They are different tools, and they manage different kinds of risk.”

Inside the audit room

In 2025, Shah organised and led a process audit of a major vehicle software program within his organisation. Over a period of weeks, his team interviewed the system, software, project-management and release teams against Automotive SPICE requirements and produced a tracked action plan with named owners for each finding.

On the supplier side, his team carries out assessments and audits of software suppliers, covering Automotive SPICE, functional safety, cybersecurity and software compliance. After earning his intacs Provisional Assessor certification in late 2024, Shah began taking part in formal assessment teams, working alongside other certified assessors. In September 2026, he was one of five assessors on an intacs-logged assessment that rated a Tier-1 supplier against Automotive SPICE 3.1 processes up to Capability Level 2.

“I see the certification as proof of a skill, not just knowledge of a document,” he says. “Reading the standard is easy. What’s harder is sitting with a supplier’s engineering team, going through their actual process evidence, and making a fair, defensible judgment about their capability”

Sharing the approach with the industry

In June 2024, Stellantis co-hosted, with consultancies Envorso and Tobii, a one-day Gate4SPICE workshop at its Auburn Hills technical centre on the new Automotive SPICE “Potential Analysis”. Gate4SPICE is the practitioner event series run by intacs, and places are prioritised for certified assessors. Shah coordinated Stellantis’s hosting and, with one of his colleagues, he presented how the company sets software-quality requirements for suppliers, when waivers are granted and how escalations and audits work. The event brought together participants from across the automotive supply chain, including representatives from Continental, Magna International, DENSO, Valeo, Garmin, Nexteer, Bosch, Kostal, ZooKoo Consulting, Vitesco, and other organisations.

In September 2026, he served as a session lead at the North American SPICE (NASPICE) Conference in Novi, Michigan, where he moderated sessions and kept them on schedule. He has since been invited to join the Selection Committee for the 2027 conference.

The stakes of getting it wrong

The automotive industry’s shift toward software-defined vehicles makes quality governance both more important and more difficult. Modern vehicles can carry very large amounts of code, with figures of 100 million lines or more often cited, spread across many electronic control units supplied by a fragmented global supply chain. A defect in software that governs a safety-critical function can cause field failures at a scale that draws regulatory attention and puts consumers at risk.

“That is why I focus on the early stages of development,” Shah says, “so those failures get caught while they can still be fixed.”

Why it matters beyond Detroit

Software quality is largely decided far upstream of the showroom. For markets such as Nigeria, where most vehicles are imported, the safety of braking, steering and engine software depends on processes run by engineers and suppliers in other countries, long before a car is shipped. As vehicles become more software-defined and more of their functions can be updated over the air, the discipline behind that code becomes part of what buyers everywhere are relying on.

The industry’s next tests, the transition to Automotive SPICE 4.0 and the growing use of AI in software development, were prominent themes at the 2026 NASPICE conference. Shah’s approach to both is consistent with the rest of his career: catching problems early, measuring them continuously, and holding in-house teams and suppliers to the same standard of evidence.

Nitin Shah holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Samrat Ashok Technological Institute (SATI), Vidisha, India (1995). He is a Project Management Professional (PMP®) certified by the Project Management Institute, an intacs™ Certified Provisional Assessor for Automotive SPICE®, and an IEEE Senior Member and a Fellow of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication
Engineers (IETE). He is based in Auburn Hills, Michigan.