While many items in MISRA are sensible (some I do find quite counterproductive, if code quality in terms of readability and maintainability is also a concern), I have seen MISRA standards being applied to a legacy embedded codebase with terrible effects. What was being done, for example, was putting explicit typecasts everywhere a warning popped up respective mismatched integer sizes or similar, instead of refactoring the code to improve variable typing.
The best end result was largely unreadable code. Why? Because the junior developers tasked with the MISRA compliance efforts were measured by reducing the number of warnings instead of improving code quality.
The bonus was actual breakage in the field, as the test coverage of the legacy code being converted was particularly abysmal. But not to worry, another junior dev was tasked with creating unit tests for every function! With a codebase unsuitable to unit testing through fuzzy interfaces, that effort was about as effective as one would expect, too.
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The best end result was largely unreadable code. Why? Because the junior developers tasked with the MISRA compliance efforts were measured by reducing the number of warnings instead of improving code quality.
The bonus was actual breakage in the field, as the test coverage of the legacy code being converted was particularly abysmal. But not to worry, another junior dev was tasked with creating unit tests for every function! With a codebase unsuitable to unit testing through fuzzy interfaces, that effort was about as effective as one would expect, too. </rant>