Within the last two decades the automotive industry has become intrinsically reliant on embedded software. It is estimated that there are close to 100 separate MCUs in a high-end car today, controlling everything from fuel delivery to central locking, and that number is increasing.

Since the early 90s the automotive industry has understood the importance of software and the role it must play in vehicle safety. Meeting those obligations requires demonstrable and stringent adherence to a set of guidelines developed by the Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA). The MISRA-C and MISRA-C++ guidelines, or coding standards, have now been adopted across the automotive industry and beyond, proving that safety and software can coexist.

The fundamental objective of the MISRA coding standards is to recommend a safe subset of the C/C++ languages for use in safety critical applications. The flexibility of C/C++ provides an opportunity for complexity; a leading cause of failure. There are in excess of 140 individual rules within the MISRA-C:2004+TC1, each one intended to minimize the risk posed by the language's flexibility. Enforcing those rules without some form of automated tool flow would represent a massive overhead for the entire automotive supply chain.

While MISRA doesn't endorse any individual tools for the enforcement of its coding standards, it does recognize the need for tools that can accurately identify and help eliminate violations to the coding standards within source code. PRQA is a leading contributor to the MISRA Coding Standards and offers industry-leading tools for their enforcement.

PRQA's QA·C & QA·C++ static analysis tools provide an unsurpassed environment for the development of source code compliant with the MISRA coding standards.