An Empirical Study of MISRA-C Related Source Code Changes in Open-source Software Projects

Suhyun Park, Jaechang Nam, Shin Hong

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2024.51.8.718

This paper presents empirical studies on 75 open-source projects hosted on GitHub to explore how source code changes align with MISRA C coding guidelines. Through our analysis of the studied projects, we have identified eight distinctive keywords that represent the software domains where compliance with MISRA C coding guidelines is likely to be found. Additionally, we discovered that 54.75% of the studied projects utilizes at least one static rule checker. In the 75 studied projects, we found code changes associated with 75 MISRA C coding rules. The analyses of these code changes reveal that multiple MISRA C-related code changes often occur in a short timeframe, and, on average, each MISRA C-related code change modifies 1124 lines of code at once.