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Safety-critical software (aerospace, defense, automotive, medical)

Teams building software that can hurt someone if it fails — flight systems, weapons, vehicle control, infusion pumps — work under standards that dictate how code is written and what evidence they must produce. Understand supports that work in three ways: it enforces the coding standards, it measures the structural properties reviewers care about, and it produces the artifacts you attach to an audit.

This page maps the safety-critical workflow onto the concrete how-tos.

1. Enforce the coding standard

Most safety-critical programs mandate a coding standard. CodeCheck ships the ones these domains use — MISRA C / MISRA C++ (automotive, and widely adopted elsewhere), AUTOSAR C++14, SEI CERT, MITRE CWE Top 25, and more. See Which standard should I check against? to map your obligation to a configuration, then:

Where cybersecurity requirements sit alongside safety (CWE, SEI CERT), see Check code for security vulnerabilities.

2. Control complexity

Safety standards care about structural complexity because complex code is hard to test and review to the required rigor. In automotive specifically, the HIS (Hersteller-Initiative Software) metric set is a common contractual requirement — Understand ships it as a metric set, an interactive report, and a CodeCheck standard. See HIS metrics and Interpret key metrics for when a number should worry you.

To visualize a flagged unit — its control flow, its callers, its reach — pick the right view in Which graph should I use?. For a full find-visualize-fix workflow, see Finding & reducing complexity.

3. Automate and gate

Compliance that only happens at milestones drifts. Run checks continuously so a regression fails fast:

4. Produce the evidence

When it's time to demonstrate conformance, generate a compliance report — the standard-by-rule artifact reviewers expect, including your documented deviations. For the design-description side of the audit package, see Generate design documentation from your code.

5. Certification & tool qualification

Certification programs (e.g. DO-178C for airborne software) ask whether the tools in your process are qualified, and what role each plays. Those questions carry legal weight, so this cluster keeps the authoritative answers on dedicated pages rather than restating them here:

Read the certification pages for the exact wording

Any claim about Understand's certification or qualification status must come from the pages above, which carry the correct caveats and sign-off language. Do not paraphrase them.

6. Secure & air-gapped deployment

Many safety-critical environments are classified or disconnected. Understand runs fully offline, and its AI features can run against a local model with no cloud calls — useful when answering a security review. See Security-review answers and Local AI with no cloud calls.