Evaluating the relation between coding standard violations and faultswithin and across software versions

In spite of the widespread use of coding standards and tools enforcing their rules, there is little empirical evidence supporting the intuition that they prevent the introduction of faults in software. In previous work, we performed a pilot study to assess the relation between rule violations and actual faults, using the MISRA C 2004 standard on an industrial case. In this paper, we investigate three different aspects of the relation between violations and faults on a larger case study, and compare the results across the two projects. We find that 10 rules in the standard are significant predictors of fault location.