Managing MISRA compliance is way easier with the right tools
Let us say you are a manager in charge of ensuring a project is MISRA compliant by a certain date. If you are working with the original development team and all of them have suitable MISRA skills, things are easier: every module has a "code owner" and, for MISRA guidelines that are at the single-translation unit level (i.e., that can be checked and enforced one source file at a time), each developer will know what to do.
By the way, we offer an excellent MISRA training course online, did you know? Drop us an email to receive a quote.
What if you are not that lucky?
But what about the guidelines that involve more than one translation unit? What if you do not have the original code owners around? What if you have inherited code from a previous project? In these cases you, the manager, will have to coordinate the team to work in such a way that is as efficient as possible, to keep your deadline.
What you ideally would want - and need - is a MISRA checking tool that offers these three functionalities:
- Reporting of MISRA violations that allows you to easily control the right level of detail for your current management work.
- Powerful and easy-to-use features selection, to define sets of MISRA violations according to multiple criteria.
- With a simple click, automatically file tickets to your issue-tracking system, assigning them to whoever you want to be responsible for dealing with the violation.
You know what? This tool exists, and it is called ECLAIR.
Support for all possible actions in your issue-tracking
ECLAIR is a powerful ally when it comes to stay on top of all the tasks required to bring your project into MISRA compliance on time. The upcoming release 3.11.0 enables full integration with any issue-tracking system out there. From the ECLAIR detailed report, you are then able to:
- define actions like "file ticket and assign it to Zoe" and "file ticket and assign it to John”;
- run these actions on individual violations or groups of violations.
The actions are completely general, which means they support anything that is supported by your issue-tracking system. For instance, does that support a notion of priority? Then you can control that within ECLAIR. For issue-tracking systems that support attachments in tickets, ECLAIR can attach a screenshot of a violation, where all relevant details can be seen. This is an important feature: your team will see exactly what you were looking at when you assigned the ticket.
Zoom on this example. This is a Mantis issue automatically filed with just one click.
As you can see, it contains:
- The name of the person who reported the issue;
- The name of the person to whom the issue has been assigned;
- The severity of the issue, which is helpful to prioritize work;
- A detailed summary stating both rule and category;
- A brief description of what the violated guideline entails;
- The area of violation, including a link to open it in the source code;
- Tags, for filtering issues;
- And a screenshot, showing a preview of the area of violation.
All of this information makes it much easier and faster for your team members to focus on precise code areas. They know where to look and what to look for. This will efficiently keep the workflow tracked and in order, saving time and making it easier for you to keep your deadlines.
Want to know more about ECLAIR and its upcoming release 3.11.0? Contact us. We will be happy to schedule a call to walk you through the main features and have a chat about your MISRA strategy.
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Roberto Bagnara, PhD is CTO of BUGSENG, a leading provider of solutions and services for static code analysis. He is also a member of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 - C Standardization Working Group and the MISRA C Working Group.