Coverity Finds Fewer Defects in Open Source Software
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.
The full Coverity report for 2009 is available in PDF format.
Tag Cloud
News
-
Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
-
Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
-
FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
-
Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
-
Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
-
ack 2.0 Released
ack is a grep-like, command-line tool that has been optimized for programmers to search large trees of source code.
-
SUSE Studio 1.3 Released
New features in SUSE Studio 1.3 include enhanced cloud integration, VM platform support, and lifecycle management.
-
Xen To Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
The Linux Foundation recently announced that the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
-
RunRev Releases Open Source Version of LiveCode
Open source version of LiveCode is now available for developing apps, games, and utilities for all major platforms.
-
OpenDaylight Project Formed
OpenDaylight is an open source software-defined networking project committed to furthering adoption of SDN and accelerating innovation in a vendor-neutral and open environment.