Skip to content

Which coding standard should I check against?

Understand ships built-in configurations for many published standards. Pick the one your project is obligated to; you can copy and tailor it (see run your first check).

The Manage Configurations dialog: prebuilt configurations listed on the left (AUTOSAR, Bug Hunter, MISRA C and C++ editions, SEI CERT, SciTools' Recommended Checks, The Power of Ten) with the selected configuration's checks listed on the right.
Checks → Select Checks lists every prebuilt configuration with its check count; select one to see exactly which checks it runs.

Published standards

Each standard name below links to its coverage-matrix page, which lists every rule and whether it is automated (each page also offers a downloadable PDF).

Standard Checks Automated coverage
AUTOSAR 362 91%
MISRA C 2004 / 2012 / 2023 / 2025 107 / 155 / 207 / 207 75% / 97% / 95% / 93%
MISRA C++ 2008 / 2023 190 / 165 83% / 93%
SEI CERT C / C++ / Java 96 / 73 / 115 79% / 88% / 71%
MITRE CWE Top 25 13 50%
Hersteller Initiative Software (HIS) Metrics 18 100%
The Power of Ten 12 100%
PEP 8 (Python) 7 in development
Ada 95 43 in development
Effective C++ 17 31%
Compiler Warnings 704 100%
Bug Hunter (C/C++ defect checks) 8 100%
SciTools' Recommended Checks 206 100%

Read the coverage % correctly

Coverage is the share of the standard's rules that CodeCheck can check automatically. The remainder are rules that require manual review (not mechanically decidable). A compliance effort must still account for the non-automated rules — see produce a compliance report.

Standards marked in development ship and are usable — checks are still being added, so no coverage figure is published for them yet.

Per-language check catalogs also exist (C ≈ 2,830 checks, C++ ≈ 2,690, Java 334, Python 66, Ada 114, Fortran 61, VHDL 80, C# 63, Web 46, and more). The full matrix set is indexed in the CodeCheck standards reference.

Where to next