04-01-2008, 01:15 PM
Derek Farn wrote:
>Can you please provide references to some of these \"many studies\".
>I have looked long and hard for articles/papers that have studied the impact of coding guidelines/language subsets/tools on software quality/errors/maintenance.
I've been doing some Googling over the holidays. Dr. Les Hatton (the guy who wrote \"Safer C\") has done actual research on the topic. His home page is at http://www.leshatton.org.
Interestingly, he divides coding guidelines into types A (purely style) and B (safety related). He further divides B guidelines into B.1 (\"folklore\"; e.g. the prohibition of goto) and B.2 (those for which there's evidence, no matter how slight; e.g., casting pointer types).
According to Dr. Hatton, only 55 of the 127 rules in MISRA-1 were of type B.2 (though he doesn't identify them ;-). He isn't too impressed with MISRA-2 either - he seems to regard it as an opportunity lost.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
>Can you please provide references to some of these \"many studies\".
>I have looked long and hard for articles/papers that have studied the impact of coding guidelines/language subsets/tools on software quality/errors/maintenance.
I've been doing some Googling over the holidays. Dr. Les Hatton (the guy who wrote \"Safer C\") has done actual research on the topic. His home page is at http://www.leshatton.org.
Interestingly, he divides coding guidelines into types A (purely style) and B (safety related). He further divides B guidelines into B.1 (\"folklore\"; e.g. the prohibition of goto) and B.2 (those for which there's evidence, no matter how slight; e.g., casting pointer types).
According to Dr. Hatton, only 55 of the 127 rules in MISRA-1 were of type B.2 (though he doesn't identify them ;-). He isn't too impressed with MISRA-2 either - he seems to regard it as an opportunity lost.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).