How to Change Applicability When a Rules and Recommendations Change

Follow this process to review changed standards and position them for further review. The Change History page for each language enables you to add appropriate items to the Secure Coding Newsletter to track any significant changes to rules and recommendations. Therefore, significant changes will be tracked in the newsletter.

1.  Review the Secure Coding Newsletter for significant changes made to rules/recs.
2. Select a rule or recommendation that affects Android development.
3. Review the rule/rec to quickly see if the change was significant enough to possibly affect its applicability to Android development. (More about applicability status is provided below.)
4. Determine what the status of the rule/recommendation should now be and change the label as appropriate (e.g., "android-applicable" to no label).
5. If the label of the rule/rec was or is Unknown or Applicable in Principle, find the page that contains the table applicable to the rule/rec.
   1. If you are changing the status from either of these status items, you must evaluate the comment in the table next to the rule/rec and determine if it should be kept or not. If kept, add it to the rule/rec as either part of it or as a comment.
   2. If you are changing the status to either of these status items, you must add a row to the table of the appropriate page and add any comments to the comments column.
6. Later, when someone on the team has time, that person can review items on the Applicability in Principle and Unknown and determine if the rule/rec is applicable or not. At that point, the related row in the table would be removed and the rule/rec would be labeled with 'android-applicable' or 'android-inapplicable'.

Applicability Status

A rule/rec's applicability to Android development is indicated by two things: a label on the rule/rec page and its location on a page (and possibly in a table) in the Android Space. The rules/recs that are judged to the Applicable or Not Applicable are listed on pages (e.g., Applicable to Android (C Rules/Recomendations)). The rules/recs that are Applicable in Principle or Unknown appear in tables on pages (e.g.,  Applicable in Principle to Android (C Rules/Recomendations)), which enables you to log comments about applicability before a final decision is made.