Course IAR109
Safety Critical Systems C programming and the MISRA C guidelines
Safety Critical Systems C programming and the MISRA C guidelines
Duration: 2 Days
Intended Audience
This course is for engineers and embedded systems programmers who have a good knowledge of C programming and who need a course that explores the applications of the MISRA guidelines as part of the process of developing improved embedded systems code, especially for critical systems applications
Course Overview
The (2004) MISRA C guidelines aim to foster a C programming style and practice that minimises the chances of accidental bugs occurring in the C code being developed. Most of the guidelines should come as "second nature" to careful and conscientious C programmers. Occasionally there may be some "debate" regarding certain of the guidelines, and the course provides an opportunity for discussion regarding the interpretation and motivation behind the various guidelines.
The style adopted by the course is to provide a comprehensive coverage of the C programming language, such as might be included in a comprehensive introductory to intermediate C programming course .. but, now, including the relevant MISRA C guidelines as the various parts of programming in C are discussed. Attendees are assumed to be able to follow most of the C examples as they are presented, and to be able to comment on and critically asess them.
Key Skills
After attending this course, you will be able to:
- understand and appreciate the MISRA C Guidelines
- be aware of their own programming practices as far as conforming to or deviating from the guidelines is concerned
- have had an opportunity of discussing the guidelines with fellow programmers
- appreciate how the guidelines might be enforced as part of an overall software quality control process
- be aware of the various tools and compilers that can check code to see where it deviates from the MISRA guidelines
Course Contents
Background to the MISRA C guidelines
The motivation underlying the guidelines
The organisation of the guidelines and the guideline numbering and layout conventions used in the guidelines
Presentation of the guidelines as they apply to
- variable type
- variable scope and lifetime
- flow control, selection and iteration constructs
- restrictions on the use of break, continue and goto
- arrays and pointers and conventions regarding their use
- function prototypes and function pointers
- data structures and typedefs
- unions
- enums
- mixed language programming, especially mixed C and assembler programming
- use of non ANSI C pragmas, compiler directives and compiler extensions
- use of standard libraries
Safety critical aspects not addressed by the MISRA C guidlines an overview
- MISRA Guidelines for Safety Analysis of Vehicle Based Programmable Systems
- OSEK /VDX
- Autosar
- DO-178B
- ARINC 653
- Inline documentation using Doxygen