[SystemSafety] New paper on MISRA C

[David Ward]

As someone who has been involved with MISRA pretty much from the beginning I would like to correct a few misconceptions that have emerged in this thread.

MISRA started in the early 1990s as a collaborative project under the UK’s SafeIT programme funded by the (then) DTI and EPSRC.  Like any collaborative project this attracted grant funding which had to be matched by “in kind” contributions from the industrial partners.  In 1994 MISRA published “Development guidelines for vehicle based software” which took principles from the emerging IEC 61508 and applied them in the automotive context.  One of the specific recommendations in these guidelines was to use a subset of a standardized structured programming language.

During this collaborative project MISRA established a vision and mission statement.

Once the grant-funded project was complete, some of the industrial partners elected to continue working together on a self-funded basis and one of the first outcomes of this was the publication of MISRA C.  This arose from two automotive companies acknowledging it was better to have a single industry approach to a C subset than company specific guidelines.  I am not intending to start a debate about how MISRA C was developed but suffice it to say that people directly involved in developing the original version MISRA C are still around and have a different recollection of the events, process and sources that led to the publication of MISRA C compared to some of the opinions that have been expressed.

Once MISRA C was published support for automated checking quickly became available in a number of tools which led in turn to wider adoption outside the original automotive industry context.  MISRA therefore established a working group to continue developing MISRA C, and the subsequent revisions are developed by this working group operating under the auspices of MISRA.

More recently MISRA has revised the vision and mission statement acknowledging the wider industrial application and uptake of some of MISRA’s activities (particularly coding guidelines) and it is this revised mission statement that Roberto has quoted.

I hope this clarifies a few points.

Dr David Ward
MISRA Project Manager

From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of clayton at veriloud.com
Sent: 03 September 2018 21:19
To: Derek M Jones <derek at knosof.co.uk>
Cc: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] New paper on MISRA C

Derek,
I know your were an early contributor so I won’t debate you too much on the history ;-) but...


On Sep 3, 2018, at 8:42 AM, Derek M Jones <derek at knosof.co.uk<mailto:derek at knosof.co.uk>> wrote:

Your first sentence is a common misconception.
"The MISRA project started in 1990 with the mission of providing world-leading best practice guidelines for the safe and secure application of both embedded control systems and standalone software.”


I think more a generalization rather than misconception.


What actually happened was that MISRA were paid to write a guideline
document, it appeared at the right time and place, and was sufficiently
vague that it tool companies could claim to support it (whatever their
tool did).

If we’re talking about the origination of the standard, not the organization, I’m told it began as a BT coding standard in 1994 and initially concerned with the portability (or lack thereof) aspects of C.  In 1997, its author, working a consultant for Programming Research, was sent a draft guideline by an auto manufacturer for review.  The guideline was deemed “somewhat behind the leading edge” and the BT standard was sent back as an alternative. Four months later that alternative was sent back for review, re-titled "MISRA C Version 0.1. MISRA C 1998”. Programming Research then customized their tool to the rules and found it could "flag over 85% of statically detectable deviations.” The rest is history, but yeah an over-generalization as well. My source for this is the original author of the BT rules, Owen Morgan (then known as David Blyth).




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