Motor Industry Software Reliability Association (MISRA) is an organization that produces guidelines for the software developed for electronic components used in the automotive industry. It is a collaboration between vehicle manufacturers, component suppliers and engineering consultancies.
The aim of this organization is to provide important advice to the automotive industry for the creation and application of safe, reliable software within vehicles. The safety requirements of the software used in Automobiles is different from that of other areas such as healthcare, industrial automation, aerospace etc. The mission statement of MISRA is "To provide assistance to the automotive industry in the application and creation within vehicle systems of safe and reliable software".
MISRA was formed by a consortium of organizations formed in response to the UK Safety Critical Systems Research Programme. This programme was supported by the Department of Trade and Industry and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Following the completion of the original work, the MISRA Consortium continued on a self-funding basis.
The MISRA steering committee constitutes the following organizations.
The committee mainly includes vehicle manufacturers and component suppliers.
MISRA guidelines are the development guidelines for vehicle based software. The guidelines are intended to achieve the following.
As with many standards (for example, ISO, BSI, RTCA), the MISRA guideline documents are not free to users or implementers.
Currently MISRA guidelines are produced for MISRA C version of C and C++ programming languages only. MISRA C++ was launched on March 2008. MISRA C was updated in 2013 and is known as MISRA C:2012.