Fulfill. Prove. Certify.
Equip Your Team With Defensible Compliance Outcomes for the World’s Strictest Safety Standards.
When fragmented reporting and complex safety standards delay approvals, teams struggle to prove code quality, functional safety, and MISRA® compliance. Perforce QAC accelerates certification with a trusted, certified solution — delivering traceable, audit-ready reporting across complex C, C++, and Rust codebases.
Streamline Functional Safety Compliance. Accelerate Certification.
Align development to functional safety standards from the start to avoid delays at certification and reduce the risk of costly recalls. Identify deep, high-severity defects early to minimize rework and prevent issues from reaching production. With extensive standards coverage across safety-critical industries, Perforce QAC helps teams accelerate sign-off and achieve compliance with confidence — delivering clear, auditable evidence that stands up to internal reviews and third-party assessments.
Centralize Safety and Security Compliance. Eliminate Fragmentation. Accelerate Audit-Readiness.
Establish a single source of truth for compliance, manage deviations with greater control and consistency, and maintain full traceability across the development workflow. QAC delivers centralized compliance governance across complex codebases and brings engineering, QA, and compliance teams together through shared visibility, common workflows, and centralized reporting — so your organization can move faster with less risk.
Enforce MISRA® Rules With Precision and Depth
Apply deep MISRA analysis, shaped by the experts who write the standards. Get results you can trust: Perforce QAC is built to find the defects other tools miss without creating extra noise. Its inter-procedural dataflow analysis and 100% MISRA coverage deliver deep, accurate analysis across mixed-language C/C++/Rust codebases, so your team can reliably support safer releases.
Deliver Safer, More Compliant Software With QAC
Perforce safety experts actively shape MISRA and Rust standards (currently in development). With nearly 40 years of experience and backed by experts who actively participate in MISRA C/C++ and Rust standards committees, Perforce is your trusted advisor in regulated production environments.
MISRA
MISRA addresses the unique challenges posed by C and C++ in safety-critical applications. Get 100% MISRA coverage and extend enforcement through custom rules and compliance modules to align with both industry standards and internal policies. QAC provides broader coverage than most solutions, delivering deeper insights across complex codebases.
Rust
Rust is known for its built-in memory-safety guarantees, but Rust alone is not enough to ensure full software safety. Catch the deep logic, unsafe blocks, concurrency, and many other vulnerabilities early to tackle Rust blind spots.
Deep, Accurate Coverage. Reduced Risk in Safety-Critical Code. Centralized Compliance.
Perforce QAC Key Features
Identify and apply fixes to coding standards rule violations and security vulnerabilities as soon as they’re introduced. Prove compliance with internationally recognized functional safety and security standards.
- Coding Guidelines and Industry Standards: Comprehensive coverage of coding, safety, and security-focused standards, including MISRA, AUTOSAR, CERT, WP.29, ISO 26262, and DO-178C with the QAC DO-330 Tool Qualification pack.
- Sound Abstract Interpretation: Enable deep rule enforcement across control flows and call paths.
- Fine-Grained Diagnostics: High accuracy of analysis means finding more real issues with fewer false positives.
- Enforce Code Quality and Memory Safety: Catch the deep logic, unsafe blocks, concurrency, API misuse, architectural drift ,and integration vulnerabilities that Rust alone does not address.
Prioritize coding issues based on the severity of risk. Perforce QAC helps you target the most critical defects using filters, suppressions, and baselines. It delivers accurate diagnostics and actionable results — enabling you to fix the most important issues first.
Scale across branches and variants. Project Streams and modules simplify variant and component management, enabling efficient compliance across complex codebases. Keep compliance synchronized across distributed teams without duplicate work; Perforce Validate centralizes outcomes, deviations, and approvals. With scalable reporting, CI and IDE integration, and support for complex variants through streams and modules, QAC helps organizations demonstrate compliance with greater speed, clarity, and confidence in certification and release decisions.
Creating streams provides the following benefits:
- Assign a single project rule configuration to all variants.
- Issues common to multiple variants are automatically kept in sync and only require citing once.
- Easily identify identical issues across multiple streams and issues unique to a specific stream.
- Generate reports on individual streams for compliance, functional safety, or other evidential purposes.
- More convenient organization and efficient storage of analysis data.
QAC helps you achieve certification for DO-178C and DO-278 faster, using the DO-330 Qualification Pack. Using a qualified tool helps you qualify the output of your software development tools faster.
Perforce Validate is a centralized store of analysis results from Perforce Static Analysis products, QAC and Klocwork. Validate provides analysis data, trends, and configurations for codebases across the organization. It is also highly customizable, empowering your team to easily define specific QA and compliance rule configurations, identify issues and deviations, and review the entirety of the code by project and section to adequately meet your team’s needs.
QAC is designed with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery foremost in our thinking, which makes it easy to include static analysis as part of your CI/CD pipelines.
Full Traceability Across the Development Workflow
Define rule configurations, review code by project, and triage issues through the CI and web portal. With support for Web API and CI-based workflows, teams can connect desktop and cloud-based analysis into a complete compliance record. That traceability empowers teams to:
- Track findings from detection through resolution
- Link analysis activity to compliance objectives and reports
- Demonstrate adherence to coding standards with confidence
- Provide auditors with clear, reviewable diagnostics and history.
QAC supports safer releases with integrations across major compilers, IDEs (such as Microsoft Visual Studio), version control systems (such as Perforce P4), CI build servers (such as Jenkins) and CI/CD pipelines including delta analysis to help gate commits before risk grows.
QAC’s inter-procedural dataflow analysis goes beyond surface-level scanning to deliver deep, contextual insights into your codebase. When paired with AI, these findings — complete with detailed documentation and precise fix instructions — give the AI everything it needs to generate highly accurate, actionable remediations. The result: AI-assisted code remediation fix suggestions that are not just technically correct, but tailored to your specific codebase and compliance standards, helping developers resolve quality issues earlier and with far less effort.
In safety-critical environments where compliance is crucial, trust and verification can’t be overlooked. AI-assisted code remediation leverages the depth of QAC coverage of major safety and security coding standards for C and C++ to quickly enforce these standards across your codebase and help fulfill (and prove) compliance with functional safety requirements. Quality and compliance are strictly maintained with human oversight: the AI-assisted code remediation feature requires developer approval for all suggested fixes, ensuring your code remains secure, compliant, and free of AI-generated vulnerabilities.
AI-assisted code remediation easily integrates with VS Code. Built for flexibility, the VS Code plugin with GitHub CoPilot capabilities provide broad AI compatibility with support for multiple LLM options. Development teams can use tools they are familiar with while automatically fixing reported issues prior to commit and confirming those fixes in-phase — passing every quality gate. Teams can also use CoPilot’s interactive chat to clarify issues and fine-tune fixes alongside the AI.
Go beyond early defect detection to intelligent resolution. Learn more about accelerating safety-critical development with AI-assisted code remediation.
How It Works
Follow along with this interactive demo of Perforce QAC to preview key features.
Achieve Coding Standards Compliance
Perforce QAC makes it easy to comply with coding standards. You can use the following compliance taxonomies to enforce coding standards across your codebase. And, you’ll get fewer false positives and false negatives in your diagnostics.
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Safety Standards
C
C++
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Safety Standards
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MISRA C: 2004
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MISRA C:2012 (All Amendments)
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MISRA C:2023
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MISRA C:2025
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Barr-C
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MISRA C++:2008
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MISRA C++:2023
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AUTOSAR C++14
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JSF AV C++
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Security Standards
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CERT
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CWE
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CWE Top 25
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ISO/IEC TS 17961 (C Secure)
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Quality Standards
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High Integrity C++ (HIC++)
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Custom Standards & Compliance Modules
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Create Your Own Standard
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Create Your Own Rules
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Custom Compliance Module
“We’re impressed by the performance of Perforce QAC. It is very accurate. It finds issues that other tools have missed.”
QAC Professional Services: Continuous, Reliable Support
Get onboarding and ongoing support with Perforce QAC. You’ll start with an onboarding package for a successful experience.
You may also use the QAC help documentation for easy-to-follow instructions — whether setting up your workflow or finding answers to specific questions.
Learn More About Onboarding PackagesVisit QAC Help Documentation
Trusted by Industry Leaders Where Compliance Matters Most
Leaders working in mission-critical industries trust QAC to maintain quality and accelerate compliance.
Embedded Development
Managing increasingly complex software is essential to keep the design and development of embedded systems on track, especially when these processes need to happen under strict compliance guidelines. Perforce QAC enforces compliance you can prove at every build, so you can innovate without slowdowns.
Automotive
Automotive software development requires more than 100 million lines of code. What’s more, the installed embedded software is generally developed independently from the rest of the automobile.
Because of this, development teams must be able to effectively manage a unique set of challenges. With Perforce QAC, development teams are able to collaborate on projects and ensure that their code is high quality and meets regulatory compliance.
Aerospace and Defense
Aerospace, defense, and military organizations use embedded software every day. Making sure that software is safe, secure, and reliable is critical. This puts developers under pressure to produce software without any defects.
Large code bases and complex systems make this a challenge. Tough compliance requirements make it even more difficult. With Perforce QAC, airborne systems developers can easily prove compliance and develop quality systems.
Medical Technology
The quality of software embedded in medical devices can mean the difference between life and death. Because of this, there is increasing scrutiny for both safety and security in devices.
By using Perforce QAC, you’ll be able to meet ever-changing government regulations, and verify that your medical devices are safe, reliable, and efficient.
Industrial Automation
Ensure the functional safety compliance of critical infrastructure for robotics, IoT, or energy and utilities management. Meet industry regulations as well as mitigate potential security vulnerabilities and coding errors. This can be a significant challenge for teams to effectively meet.
With Perforce QAC, industrial product development teams can easily comply with coding standards, identify potential risks, and have visibility into code compliance.
Strengthen Confidence in Safety-Critical Software
Reduce certification risk and simplify compliance and reporting for safety-critical regulations. Perforce QAC is independently certified for TÜV-SÜD, ISO 9001, and ISO 27001.
TÜV-SÜD Certified
TÜV-certified qualification materials support functional safety processes in highly regulated industries. Perforce QAC is TÜV-SÜD certified for compliance with key functional safety standards:
- ISO 26262 (automotive) up to ASIL D.
- IEC 61508 (general industry) up to SIL 4.
- EN 50716 (railways) up to SW-SIL 4.
- IEC 62304 (medical devices) up to Software Safety Class C.
- IEC 60880 (nuclear power).
ISO 9001 Certified
Perforce QAC is also certified in ISO 9001.
ISO 9001 is one of the most widely adopted standards. It ensures that organizations are striving to meet and exceed customers’ requirements and satisfaction through continuous improvement.
ISO 27001 Certified
Perforce QAC is also certified in ISO 27001.
ISO 27001 gives specific requirements that an organization must meet in order to be certified by an accredited certification body following the successful completion of an audit.
Test QAC in Your Dev Environment
Request your free trial of Perforce QAC today.
See QAC Live
Start with your custom demo, or access our on-demand QAC demo to get an immediate look at QAC’s key features.
Frequently Asked Questions
Perforce QAC is a static code analysis tool for C, C++, and Rust that helps organizations developing safety-critical and regulated software identify defects, enforce coding standards, and demonstrate compliance with functional safety requirements. It's an abstract interpretation solver that can be configured for soundness to prove the absence of issues. It is widely used in industries such as aerospace and defense, rail, medical devices, industrial systems, and automotive (where customers call it the “de facto static code analysis tool within the automotive industry”). It’s an essential testing and compliance tool where software quality, traceability, and certification readiness are critical.
Perforce QAC is an abstract interpretation solver that can be configured for soundness to prove the absence of issues. It analyzes source code without executing it, identifying coding standard violations, safety issues, quality defects, and security weaknesses early in development. Its sound inter-procedural dataflow analysis examines control flows and call paths across the codebase, helping teams detect issues that may be difficult to find through testing or manual review alone. You can watch a demo of QAC here.
It also includes AI-assisted code remediation that’s accurate, context-aware, and developer-approved before anything else enters your codebase. Instead of spending hours researching a resolution, the integrated AI assistant analyzes each found defect using deep contextual data from QAC and suggests highly accurate, compliant code corrections that are grounded in a precise understanding of how your code actually behaves.
Perforce QAC provides deep MISRA coverage for MISRA C:2025, MISRA C:2023, MISRA C:2004, MISRA C++:2023, and MISRA C++:2008. Built with input from experts who actively contribute to MISRA standards development, QAC delivers deep rule enforcement, precise diagnostics, and comprehensive reporting to help organizations confidently demonstrate MISRA compliance across complex codebases. For detailed rule coverage and compliance documentation, contact Perforce or review the latest product documentation.
Perforce QAC helps organizations establish compliance earlier in the development process by detecting defects, enforcing coding standards, and generating traceable evidence — including in AI development workflows such as AI-generated code. It also provides tool qualification packs needed for certification and audit activities. Teams can continuously monitor compliance, manage deviations, track remediation efforts, and produce reports that demonstrate adherence to safety-related requirements.
Perforce QAC supports organizations developing software under a wide range of functional safety standards, including ISO 26262 (automotive), IEC 61508, IEC 62304 (medical devices), EN 50716 (rail), IEC 60880 (nuclear), and DO-330 qualification support (aerospace). QAC is certified by TÜV-SÜD and the certificate is available here.
Perforce QAC helps organizations support ISO 26262 compliance by enforcing coding standards such as MISRA, identifying defects early, maintaining traceability, and generating objective evidence for assessment and certification activities. QAC is certified by TÜV-SÜD for safety-related software development up to ASIL D, helping teams incorporate static analysis into a broader ISO 26262 compliance strategy. Contact Perforce to discuss ISO 26262 qualification for your project’s requirements.
The Perforce Qualification Packs and Kits help organizations accelerate tool qualification activities for safety-critical projects following standards such as ISO 26262 (automotive), IEC 61508, IEC 62304 (medical devices), EN 50716 (rail), IEC 60880 (nuclear), and DO-330 (aerospace). The packages include the core qualification artifacts required to support tool qualification, such as the Tool Qualification Plan (TQP), Tool Operational Requirements (TOR), and Tool Qualification Data (TQD), reducing the effort required to generate qualification evidence independently. Contact Perforce to discuss the qualification package and documentation applicable to your specific compliance requirements.
Perforce QAC maintains a centralized record of analysis results, compliance status, deviations, approvals, and project metrics, and provides tool qualification packs needed for certification and audit activities. Through the Perforce Validate platform, organizations can track compliance trends, generate standardized reports, manage evidence across teams, and maintain traceability from issue detection through resolution. This helps reduce the effort required to prepare for internal reviews and third-party assessments.
Perforce QAC allows teams to manage findings through filters, suppressions, baselines, and centralized compliance workflows. Using the Perforce Validate platform, organizations can review, track, and document deviations at scale while maintaining visibility into compliance status across projects and variants. This enables teams to apply governance consistently, preserve traceability, and demonstrate that exceptions have been reviewed and managed according to project or regulatory requirements. You can watch a demo of QAC for C, C++, and Rust here.
Perforce QAC licensing is tailored to an organization's development environment, compliance requirements, and deployment model. Licensing options may vary based on factors such as developer usage, CI/CD workflows, reporting requirements, and organizational scale. For detailed information regarding licensing models, pricing, evaluation options, and deployment recommendations, contact Perforce.