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Coverity Finds Fewer Defects in Open Source Software
Sep 28, 2009
The code analysis specialists Coverity attest to a quality improvement in the open source software they tested.
Coverity investigates code from diverse open source applications in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The agency sees the investigation and the resulting improvement in quality as important because more and more state agencies are relying on free and open software.
Projects can post a request for analysis on the Coverity website and then provide the source code. Among the projects are Firefox, PHP and Linux itself. Coverity's report reveals that finding around 11,000 defects in 2009 meant a 16% reduction over the last year.
Coverity's defect ranking list for 2009. Source: Coverity
Coverity categorizes the projects into rankings based on the quality of their coce. So far only four projects have achieved the highest ranking, Rung 3, Samba, tor, OpenPAM and Ruby. By Coverity's account, they analyzed over 60 million lines of code since the start of their investigation in 2006. The method they use is static analysis, where the code is read directly for security and performance issues without actually running the app. So it tests not so much how it runs but how the code is structured and how it might lead to a faulty sequence of operations.
Watch our free Video Archive from Apachecon US 2009. Archive provided by The Apache Foundation, COLLABNET, and Linux Pro Magazine
Drawing internationally renowned thought-leaders, contributors, and organizations in the Open Source community, ApacheCon offers insight into the culture and community that develops and shepherds industry-leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server – the world's most popular Web server software for more than 10 years.
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