The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code

10 rules:

  1. Avoid complex flow constructs, such as goto and Recursion.
  2. All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code.
  3. Avoid Heap (Memory) Allocation
  4. Restrict functions to a single printed page.
  5. Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function.
  6. Restrict the scope of data to the smallest possible.
  7. Check the return value of all non-void functions, or cast to void to indicate the return value is useless.
  8. Use the Preprocessor sparingly.
  9. Limit pointer use to a single dereference, and do not use Function Pointers.
  10. Compile with all possible warnings active; all warnings should then be addressed before release of the software.