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