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Developers widely use the MISRA rules and coding standards compliance in businesses beyond the automotive industry, such as medical and medical devices, military, aerospace, industrial automation, rail, and energy. The standards provide a set of guidelines for writing embedded C and C++ code, and facilitate the development of safe, secure, and portable code for safety- and security-critical systems.
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The MISRA Consortium, commonly known as MISRA, refers to the widely adopted and legendary coding standard for C and C++ languages. MISRA provides a comprehensive set of coding guidelines that focuses on protecting applications against known safety violations and security vulnerabilities. The Association classifies guidelines as either a “rule” or a “directive.”
A rule comes with a complete description of the coding requirement, and through static analysis, developers can use it to check that source code complies with a guideline without the need to seek out any other information. A directive, on the other hand, offers an important prescription or development guidance for developers to follow when it’s generally not possible for them to perform a check for compliance.
MISRA is a consortium of automotive-related industries that came together in the early 1990s as a result of the United Kingdom’s Safety Critical Systems Research Programme. The U.K. government instituted this program to address some of the challenges that the automobile industry faced due to auto and truck makers increasing the use of software in the manufacture and operation of road vehicles. Parasoft is a member of the MISRA C and MISRA C++ Working Group.
MISRA EXPERT
Michal Rozenau has been an active member of the MISRA C and MISRA C++ Working Group.
As a participant in MISRA’s C and C++ working groups actively developing MISRA, Parasoft helps define the standard and is committed to swiftly performing product updates. Customers are supported with the latest technologies to continuously reduce costs and deliver safe, secure, reliable, and compliant software.
MISRA C 2025 lowers compliance overhead by removing obsolete rules and reinforcing coding best practices. Specifically, enhancements to functional safety include stricter rules on unions and pointers that decrease undefined behavior risks. Additionally, developers have increased flexibility to terminate switch clauses, like return and continue, enabling them to streamline audits while avoiding time-consuming rework.
MISRA C++ 2023 advances the lineage that MISRA C++ 2008 and AUTOSAR C++ 14 started in support of the C++ programming language, C++17. Parasoft C/C++test provides 100% coverage of this new standard. With Parasoft C/C++test, software engineers have the ability to scan modern C++ code and ensure that the applications that use C++17 and C++20 are the safest and most secure possible.
MISRA C 2023 consolidates MISRA C 2012 and all the amendments and corrigendums that have been released to date. The standard supports the C programming language, versions C90, C99, C11, and C18. Parasoft C/C++test fully supports MISRA C 2023 and has made it available to software development teams looking to ensure deployment of code that’s compliant with the latest coding standard in safety and security.
“MISRA”, “MISRA C” and the triangle logo are registered trademarks of The MISRA Consortium Limited. ©The MISRA Consortium Limited, 2021. All rights reserved.
When developers implement MISRA guidelines, it helps them deliver safe, secure, and reliable code that has everlasting benefits. MISRA compliance impacts your product’s success and longevity while reducing labor costs and time to market.
Prevent code defects earlier in the product development process before they cascade into more expensive challenges down the line.
Parasoft offers MISRA static analysis as the solution recommended by process standards like ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 62304, IEC 61508, EN 50128, and more.
Weave MISRA security code rules and directives right into your software development lifecycle as part of your SAST strategy.
Create your own custom, coding-standards configuration for your organization using our RuleWizard.
Parasoft offers the aggregation of standards like MISRA with any and all our other supported coding standards: CERT, CWE, OWASP, UL 2900, and others.
Parasoft’s MISRA static analysis integrates easily into your streamlined CI/CD pipeline with continuous testing that delivers high-quality, safe, and secure software quickly.
Parasoft incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve productivity in your team’s MISRA static analysis workflow, flagging and prioritizing the rule violations that the team needs to fix first.
When it comes to MISRA compliance, we recommend several highly beneficial practices. Here is a list of some of the methods to consider.
In addition to MISRA compliance, convene with your fellow software engineers and systematically check each other’s code for mistakes and coding style violations. Experience shows that this activity accelerates production and substantially improves code quality.
MISRA compliance helps you write code that is easy to read and understand. Don’t be too clever and write cryptic code that’s hard to follow or easily misunderstood. You don’t want other engineers or yourself to spend a lot of time trying to decipher a bug in your code.
When you achieve MISRA compliance, it helps you write reliable code that not only handles the sunny day scenarios but rainy days, too. This includes negative scenarios that prepare your application if it comes up against invalid data.
MISRA compliance helps programmers write code with portability in mind because portable code, like POSIX and ANSI C, allows easy and quick moves to other platforms. Developers can adapt other compilers or other operating systems with minimum code changes. Many times there are financial or business opportunities when migrating to another operating system or target needs to happen.
MISA compliance helps coders write code that does not have a large number of branches. The more branches, the higher the code complexity and the higher the number of potential bugs in the code.
MISRA compliance helps you write portable code that you can reuse in future products or projects. This improves productivity and reduces labor and testing costs.
Any MISRA guideline deviation requires thorough documentation on which guideline, scope, justification, safety assurance, consequences, and mitigation.
Coders may write some code constructs in a way that triggers a MISRA violation. Parasoft provides a method to knowingly filter out this noise.
A great thing about proposing MISRA compliance is that security teams can introduce and use the guidelines at any software development phase of a project, and the guidelines are effective even if a project is incomplete and partially coded.
The biggest challenge with introducing MISRA compliance is that a large amount of code can produce a large number of warnings. Therefore, companies should focus on getting the team productive as soon as possible when integrating MISRA compliance into a project.
Companies should also concentrate on minimizing the possibility of the static analysis warnings overwhelming the team. As achieving MISRA compliance becomes part of the developers’ daily routine, the developers can analyze results quicker and fix bugs more efficiently.
It’s also important to consider the maturity of the product under development, as this impacts the way the company can adopt MISRA compliance.
The primary approach to adopting MISRA compliance for these projects is called “acknowledge and defer.” Since developers are adding little new code, all of the safety bugs and security vulnerabilities they discover add to the existing technical debt.
The recommended approach to MISRA compliance is called “a line in the sand” approach. At a high level, this approach means developers improve new code as they develop it while deferring less critical warnings as technical debt.
Developers can integrate MISRA compliance in their development environments from the start, ensuring a high standard of quality code as they write it. The approach to adoption, in this case, is aptly named “greenfield.”
Parasoft’s analytics dashboard with automated compliance reporting. For safety and security-critical applications, you’ll want to use our TÜV SÜD certified solution on safety-critical systems.
Parasoft C/C++test detects complex MISRA compliance runtime-like problems early in the development stage — without the need to execute costly runtime tests. C/C++test analyzes the execution paths through the code and finds MISRA compliance issues, like null pointer dereferencing, division by zero, memory leaks, and security vulnerabilities, such as arithmetic on a pointer operand, buffer overflows, unreachable code, and stdlib system function.
Users can view results from C/C++test’s MISRA compliance in Parasoft’s dynamic reporting dashboard, enabling automated post-processing and advanced reporting strategies using historical data. It’s easy to see MISRA compliance results across builds over time, even when working with large codebases and legacy code where visibility into the code is typically challenging so you can quickly focus on the quality of the newly added code.
With widgets that automatically track MISRA compliance, users get a dynamic view into the software compliance process, and can easily produce automatic reports for code audits and certification goals.
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