Developing software compliant with MISRA C requires planning, documentation, and tools that best enforce the intent and spirit of the guidelines. Used in the development of safety- and security-critical software systems, the 2023 release of MISRA C:2012 Amendment 4 (AMD4) and MISRA C:2023 address concurrency features introduced in the latest two versions of the C standard (ISO/IEC 9899:2011 and 2018) and consolidate all MISRA C versions into one document.

As the saying goes, the cost of “failing to build the right product or to build the product right” impacts revenue and reputation. The only way to build the “right product” is to develop requirements that are both effective and traceable down to the software. This enables development teams, quality assurance (QA), and certifying authorities to examine any function in the software to determine its purpose by tracing it back to a requirement.

There are some technologies we just can’t seem to get away from, and that includes static analysis. As good as today’s tools are – and they are lightyears from what was available a decade ago – there is still a lot of human in the test loop. And that human costs time, money, and is prone to mistakes.

Modularity and composability are popular buzzwords in software, for everything from enterprise computing down to bare metal applications. For safety-critical embedded systems, these concepts define goals for software reuse by enabling the use of existing software components in different combinations for different use cases.

Today’s software-based, safety-critical systems depend on certified software tools and processes for development. For many applications, tool qualification is a necessary step in ensuring the tool chain produces quality code to fulfill the needs of applicable safety standards. In many cases, the use of TÜV certified tools is sufficient but there’s an increasing number of very high-stakes applications where the functional safety standards demand more.