Status of MISRA AC documents March 2014

[david ward]

The MISRA Autocode (AC) suite of documents will be undergoing a refresh in the near future to bring them up to date and align them with the new MISRA branding and other MISRA documents. MISRA AC GMG and MISRA AC SLSF will be reviewed and updated.

Based on the experience of MISRA AC contributors in using the current documents, the number and organization of documents is also up for consideration. In particular, it is believed that the code generation specific layer of guideline documents, where MISRA AC TL sits and where a MISRA AC EC offering could sit, is better supported by tool vendors themselves; the frequency of updates to auto-code generation tools has proved too high for a user-based body such as MISRA to keep track of, and it is in the interest of the tool vendors to provide guidelines directly to support their customers in meeting their respective industry software development standards.

MISRA AC TL is now seven years old and far removed from the current version of the tool offered by its vendor. This document will be deprecated and no longer supported by MISRA from 1 June 2014.

MISRA AC AGC will remain available and supported for legacy users of MISRA C:2004. It should be noted that the current version MISRA C:2012 integrates requirement for automatically-generated C code.

[Dip]

Hello Dr David,

You have mentioned that, "............ the current version MISRA C:2012 integrates requirement for automatically-generated C code."

Does it mean that, if my code is complying to MISRA C:2012, then the code automatically gets complied/ checked for MISRA AC AGC....

Pls. clarify.

[MISRA Reply]

What is meant is that the MISRA C:2012 document, in Appendix E, includes requirements for automatically-generated C code, specifying what level of compliance with each guideline is required in the case that the C code is automatically-generated rather than hand-coded. This Appendix effectively replaces the MISRA AC AGC document which is now only applicable when the rules in MISRA C:2004 are being applied to the generated code.

[kvmadan]

Hello Dr. Ward,

What is the status of the changes mentioned in your post?

According to MISRA AC INT, one document from each level of the MISRA AC Guidelines hierarchy have to be selected for using the guidelines effectively.

1. The first two levels contain the two documents MISRA AC GMG and MISRA AC SLSF. When are the updated documents expected?
2. The next level contains MISRA AC TL document which you mention, shall be/is already deprecated. So I assume it would make sense to use the guidelines provided by dSPACE for TargetLink here, as you have suggested.
3. From my understanding, the MISRA C 2012 ( along with Appendix E) shall be applicable for auto generated code for the language level.

Till the two documents awaiting updates are available would it make sense to use the old versions of the two documents along with dSPACE-TL guidelines and the MISRA C 2012 (Appendix E) as an effective combination for guidelines, assuming that the structure mentioned in MISRA AC INT still holds good?

Regards
Madan Kadambi
Software Engineer
ZF TRW