Coding standard compliance analysis tools for embedded systems from LDRA

A common way to improve the consistency, maintainability, and overall quality of code is to assess the code against industry- or company-defined standards so that deficiencies can be quickly identified and corrected. Although this could be achieved through manual peer reviews, such a process is time-consuming and prone to error.

For many companies, coding standards compliance usually starts either with guidelines and rules developed in-house or with widely accepted rules from standards such as MISRA or CERT. Often in-house rules are combined with industry-standard rules to form a corporate standard that is appropriate for the needs of the organization.

• The TBvision component of the LDRA tool suite simplifies the enforcement of coding standards improving the overall consistency and quality of the code. TBvision helps development teams develop and enforce the coding standard that is right for them – whether it consists of in-house best practices, industry coding standards, or a combination of both. Examples of supported standards include MISRA C, MISRA C++, CERT C, CERT C++, CERT Java, BARR-C, and JSF++ AV.
• LDRArulesprovides a cost-effective, stand-alone rules checker that offers a similar level of analysis but lacks the flexibility of an interface to the complete tool chain.

LDRA’s code visualization identifies exactly where the source code deviates from the standard so it can be rapidly addressed. While many rules checking tools are created equally (because they’re based on the same commercial third-party parsing engine), LDRA’s in-house parsing technology enables rapid response to variations in languages and language constructs. And a long involvement in standards organisations such as MISRA allows LDRA to be ready for new coding standards upon their release.

LDRA’s coding standards compliance tools allow developers to combine standards and define appropriate rule subsets, select individual rules, and add their own. Within the tool, it is easy to check for coding standards compliance to any single standard or combination of standards or subsets. When working with a legacy code base, it is even possible to check the compliance of a single code base with multiple standards to compare how the code fulfils each of them, and see how code might best be adapted to conform to one of them.