Buyer’s Guide: Static Code Analysis for Embedded Development

Background

Software complexity increases while delivery timeframes shrink. Modern systems often released multiple times per day, must be safe, reliable, secure, and meet industry standards. The Internet of Things alone comprises massive distributed codebases spanning edge devices and cloud services.

Static analysis tools help organizations ensure code meets uniform expectations around security, reliability, performance, and maintainability. When evaluating tools, many teams run each candidate on the same code and choose whichever reports the most violations.

This isn’t a product evaluation, it’s a bakeoff. And the winner isn’t necessarily the best tool for establishing a sustainable, scalable static analysis process within your team or organization. Many key factors that differentiate successful adoption from failed initiatives are overlooked during these exercises.

Assess Your Needs

Before searching for tools, make a brutally honest assessment of where your organization stands today and where you hope static analysis will take it:

• What specific pain points are you addressing? Improving code quality and reliability? Reducing QA defects and release delays?
• Do you have regulatory compliance requirements such as functional safety standards or industry coding standards (MISRA, AUTOSAR C++14, JSF, CERT, CWE)?
• What initiatives are underway—security improvement, DevOps, DevSecOps, IoT? Does static analysis have a direct or indirect effect on these?
• Is your development process stable, repeatable, and streamlined enough to provide a strong foundation for static analysis?

Common Capabilities

Modern static analysis tools have evolved into comprehensive platforms that go far beyond basic code checking. Leading solutions provide flexible configuration to handle large and legacy codebases, customizable checkers, and CI/CD-ready deployments, making proper configuration a critical factor for long-term success and avoiding false positives.

Effective integration across IDEs, CI/CD pipelines, and the broader toolchain ensures static analysis fits naturally into existing workflows rather than becoming a bottleneck. Ease of use is equally important, as features such as on-the-fly IDE analysis, clear documentation, and automated result management directly impact adoption and sustainability.

Advanced reporting and analytics help teams identify risk, prioritize findings, track trends over time, and communicate project status and ROI. Comprehensive support for safety and security standards, including audit-ready reporting and automated compliance evidence, is essential for regulated embedded development.

For a detailed capability comparison and table layout, read the full whitepaper.

Intangibles

Succeeding with static analysis is more than just a feature checklist. There are several intangibles that can make or break the initiative, including:

• Is the tool scalable?
• Does the vendor keep up with current standards as they evolve?
• Does the vendor provide support, training, documentation, and generally work well with their customers?

The selection process below lays out how to incorporate these important nonfunctional requirements into the evaluation effort.

Tool Selection Process

Compile a Preliminary List of Needs & Criteria

The first step is to explore the available options and compile a preliminary list of tools that seem like strong contenders. What are the criteria to consider?

Consider—But Don’t Blindly Accept Recommendations

When word gets around that an organization or team is investigating new tools, they are likely to hear some suggestions. For instance, someone may recommend tool A because it was used on a previous project. Maybe a star developer has been using tool B on his own code and thinks everyone else should use it, too.

These endorsements are great leads on tools to investigate. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that a strong recommendation,even from a trusted source, is an excuse to skip the evaluation process.

The problem with these recommendations is that the person offering them probably had a different set of requirements than exists now. They know that the tool worked well in one context. However, the current need is to select a tool that works well in the current environment and helps accomplish departmental and organizational goals. To accomplish this, it’s important to keep the big picture in sight during a comprehensive evaluation.

Explore Vendors

When an organization acquires a tool, they are committing to a relationship with the vendor of choice. Behind most successful tool deployments, there’s a vendor dedicated to helping the organization achieve business objectives, address the challenges that surface, and drive adoption.

It’s important to consider several layers of vendor qualification and assessment across the span of the evaluation process. At this early stage, start a preliminary investigation by getting a sense for what the vendor thinks of their own tool by reading whitepapers, watching webinars, and more. Focus on the big picture, not the fine granularity details.

Points to Consider

• Vision, If the vendor’s vision is not aligned with requirements and goals, or if the vendor isn’t poised to support anticipated growth, it’s best to learn this early in the process. It’s inadvisable to evaluate a vendor who is misaligned with an organization’s goals unless options are extremely limited.
• Best practices. Learn about the vendor’s recommended best practices for using their tool. Do they have a coherent strategy for how to deploy the tool across the organization? Will they evolve the tool as the organization’s needs change? Does the strategy align with the team and organization’s goals?
• Reputation. Research the vendor and find out the following: What organizations are using the tool? What do the case studies reveal about its deployment, usage, and benefits? What are industry experts saying in reviews, writeups, and awards?

Summary

Evaluating software tools for adoption and integration into a company’s software development process is a time consuming yet important practice. It’s critical that organizations have a clear understanding of their goal and motivation behind it when adopting any new tool, process, or technology. Without an end goal, success is indeterminable.

Static analysis tool evaluations often end up as a ‘bake off’ where each tool is tested on a common piece of code and evaluated on the results. Although this is useful, it shouldn’t be the only criteria used. Technical evaluation is important, of course, but evaluators need to look beyond these results to the bigger picture and longer timeline.

Evaluators need to consider how well tools manage results including easy-to-use visualization and reporting.

Teams also need to clearly understand how each tool supports claims made in areas like coding standards, for example. The tools that vendors use themselves need to be part of the evaluation. A vendor who becomes a partner in your success for the long haul is better than one that can’t provide the support, customization, and training the team requires.

Most important of all is how each tool answers these three key questions:

• Is the team going to use the tool?
• Is the tool the solution that will help the organization reach its goals?
• Is the tool a long-term solution to problems that the team faces?