MISRA tutorial and seminar announcement. Standards or Guidelines?

If you are a world traveler, The Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA) just announced a tutorial and seminar:

"A tutorial and seminar in collaboration with the Safety-Critical Systems Club (SCSC) will be held on 24 and 25 November 2010 in London, UK. On the first day there will be two half-day tutorials, on the MISRA C and MISRA C++ guidelines for the use of these languages in critical systems. The second day will be a seminar that will consider how the MISRA guidelines support safety-related systems development in various industry sectors, and we are particularly keen to feature presentations of case studies. If you would like to speak at this seminar, please discuss your idea with me in the first instance.

Further details of the programme will be available in due course.

There will also be a small exhibition on the second day. Details of the exhibition are available from Joan Atkinson at the SCSC

____________________
Dr David Ward
MISRA Project Manager
Article:

http://www.misra.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=210&t=1058&p=2032#p2032"

For those not familiar with MISRA, MISRA publishes a set of 'Guidelines' on 'Best Practices' for the languages C and C++. For example what languages constructs are bug prone and should be avoided in embedded systems used in vehicles. Many companies outside of the automotive industry have adopted the use of these guidelines, to help keep bugs out of their products.

Netrino also has a similar set of guidelines, with some links to some real world tips: Embedded C Coding Standard.

A technical semantic nit I want to pick is that these are guidelines. Standards are set by recognized bodies like IEEE and IEC - International Electrotechnical Commission. I frequently see things like "MISRA Standard". The distinction is a subtle one, but could be important to a product liability suite. Which is not to say that a company can not set 'internal standards' for coding practices. English is such a wonderful language... :-(

IEEE P730 Standards Software Quality Assurance, IEEE/EIA 12207.0 Standard for Information Technology - Software Life Cycle Processes, and IEC 61508 Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems, are all example of standards used in Embedded Systems. There are more examples at my Software Safety site.