The guidelines in this standard may be extended with organization-specific guidelines. However, the guidelines in the standard must be obeyed to claim compliance with the standard.
Training may be developed to educate software professionals regarding the appropriate application of secure coding standards. After passing an examination, these trained programmers may also be certified as secure coding professionals.
Once a secure coding standard is established, tools can be developed or modified to determine compliance with the standard. One of the conditions for a coding practice to be considered a guideline is that conformance can be verified. Verification can be performed manually or automated. Manual verification can be labor intensive and error prone. Tool verification is also problematic in that the ability of a static analysis tool to detect all violations of a guideline must be proven for each product release because of possible regression errors. Even with these challenges, automated validation may be the only economically scalable solution to validate conformance with the coding standard.
Software analysis tools may be certified as being able to verify compliance with the secure coding standard. Compliant software systems may be certified as compliant by a properly authorized certification body by the application of certified tools.