AUTOCHECK: A Tool for Checking Compliance with Automotive Coding Standards

Abstract

Coding standards are especially important in the automotive industry because automotive software bugs can have fatal consequences. An important standard in this context is Autosar, which proposes guidelines for coding in C++14 language. Strictly following this coding standard improves security, safety and the overall quality of software, and should be supported by tools that can automate compliance checks. In this paper we present a tool AutoCheck that can check compliance to 190 rules defined by Autosar standard for C++14 language. AutoCheck is implemented as an extension of the Clang compiler and can be easily adopted as it can be invoked through simple options that are added to Clang. AutoCheck also offers additional options for controlling the generated output in a user-friendly way. We discuss development decisions that include experimental evaluation of different interfaces for static analysis offered by Clang. We present experimental evaluation which shows that AutoCheck performs highly efficient and precise analysis.