Code Design and Coding Standard Compliance Checking

Method Purpose Short description of the method's purpose and main benefits

Method description A detailed description of the method

Coding standards can be used to facilitate verifiability of the produced code. If employed they tend to exclude dynamic variables or objects such as unwanted or undetected overlay of memory, and bottlenecks of resources during (safety-related) runtime. The software development shall involve the limitation of the use of interrupts, in order to keep the software verifiable and testable, as well as the use of pointers, which shall be strictly defined, in order to avoid the problems caused by uncontrolled accessing data and recursion, to avoid unverifiable and untestable use of subroutine calls.

Detailed rules shall be fully agreed upon before coding. These typically require specific actions and patterns in the design of each software component, such as modularization guidelines, inheritance depth, etc. Other points covered:

Dynamic variables use and checking: using dynamic variables cannot be checked by the compiler or other off-line tools, if they are to be used, their disposition must be handled;
If interrupts are used, then parts not able to be interrupted shall have a specified maximum computation time, so that the maximum time for which an interrupt is inhibited can be calculated.
Interrupt usage and inhibiting shall be thoroughly documented;
Pointer arithmetic shall be used at source code level only if the pointer data and value range are checked;
The use of recursion shall be documented in terms of depth of recursion

These rules enable ease of software component testing, verification, assessment and maintenance.

Method Strengths A listof the strengths of the method

Uniforms code creation enhancing component testing, verification and assessment;
Development is more solid and maintenance is less time consuming

Method Limitations The limitations of the method

Could not be applied easily to model-based designs
Method compliance hard to verify
Limited tool support for fully coverage

Method References Bibliography references to papers about the method.

Bagnara R., Bagnara A., Hill P.M. (2018) The MISRA C Coding Standard and its Role in the Development and Analysis of Safety- and Security-Critical Embedded Software. In: Podelski A. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11002. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99725-4_2
G. J. Holzmann, "The power of 10: rules for developing safety-critical code," in Computer, vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 95-99, June 2006, doi: 10.1109/MC.2006.212.

Method Dimensions

Evaluation Environment Type Type of environment where the method is applied. It can be more than one type of environment. (Dimension 1)

Evaluation Type Type of evaluation performed with that method. If a method is hybrid, more than one type can be selected. (Dimension 2)

Type of Component Under Evaluation Type of components that can be evaluated with that method. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 3)

Evaluation Stage The evaluation stage where the method is used. (Dimension 5)

Purpose of the Component Under Evaluation The type of purpose that can be evaluated by a method. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 6)

Type of Requirement Under Evaluation The type of requirements that a method is able to evaluate. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 7)

Evaluation Performance Indicator The type of evaluation criteria or KPI that a method is able to improve. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 8)

Relations

Related Methods A method could be related to other methods.

Tools A method can use zero or more tools.

Part Method A method (when it is a combination: Combination of method artefact that is a specialization of a V&V Method) could be composed of a set of V&V Methods.

Test Case or Verification and Validation activity Test Case or V&V activity performed in a Use Case. We will link to the method to the test cases where the method is used.

Standards A method can be linked with standards.

Context

Workflow

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