The Hersteller Initiative Software (HIS) source code metrics define recommended thresholds for a set of key code quality metrics, to help ensure efficient project and quality management. The HIS Metriken set was originally defined by several large automotive manufacturers (including Audi, BMW Group, DaimlerChrysler, Porsche and Volkswagen), to provide an agreed standard for developing higher quality and more maintainable code for automotive systems.

The HIS metric set is still widely used within the automotive industry today and many of the same metrics are now specifically required by the ISO 26262 automotive functional safety (FuSa) standard (Section 6). However, the guidelines also provide a good general set of code quality and complexity metrics that have found favour in many other areas of embedded and enterprise software development where the need for quality and enforcement of low complexity is of keen interest.

Are there any plans for PC-lint Plus to support such metrics? If not, Gimpel may be loosing a big share of the market to other static analysis tools that readily support these quality metrics. For instance, our automotive OEM customers require MISRA, CERT and HIS compliance in our Tier-1 ADAS products involving very large teams of developers. We would have chosen PC-lint Plus based on its merits over other commercial tools but the lack of HIS support made this impossible.