Master Software quality with Coverity

Software teams are under pressure to deliver software faster while improving its overall quality and ensuring its security. As time pressures and software scale and complexity continue to increase, traditional, QA-centric approaches to testing are no longer sufficient. Coverity helps organizations transform their testing approaches from reactive to proactive so they can deliver better quality software faster. Its unique software testing platform enables development teams to find and fix critical crash-causing and hard-to-find quality and security defects as the code is written versus later in the life cycle.

“Issues found early in the process cost a fraction of what they would cost to fix if they were found in production,” said John Chilton, SVP and general manager at Coverity. “We help both development and QA teams improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their manual and automated testing efforts by focusing on the impact of change and uncovering critical issues that would be difficult if not impossible to find through other testing techniques.”

Coverity was named to the SD Times 100 for its significant contributions to the Mobile Testing, Quality Assurance and Security category. More than 1,100 Coverity customers and 2,200 open-source projects around the globe are using the Coverity Software Testing Platform to deliver better, safer, and more reliable products to their customers.

The latest platform release
No organization wants its software to be the cause of a high-profile software failure or security breach. Yet they often face tradeoffs among faster release cycles, software quality, and security. Coverity Software Testing Platform 7.5 builds on Coverity’s tradition of delivering deep analysis algorithms for C, C++, Java, and C#. The release also expands the platform’s capabilities beyond development team, enabling QA teams to prioritize their automated and manual testing efforts without requiring access to the source code.

Development and QA teams can also collaborate more effectively, which enables faster time to market, reduced software development costs, and higher end-product quality. The new release introduces a new approach to software testing, providing QA teams with a means to focus their automated and manual testing based on the impact of code changes without requiring access to source code.

“We now have the deepest C# analysis capabilities on the market, and we offer full OWASP top 10 coverage for Java Web applications,” said Chilton. “Now development teams are empowered to address security vulnerabilities as the code is written, from within their standard workflow and without having to become security experts. QA teams can reduce their overall testing time by focusing on the code impacted by change and eliminating testing gaps.”

Coverity Scan service expands
The Coverity Scan service is a free code analysis solution for open-source development. Last year, Coverity opened up the project to Java projects, and the company added its Coverity Security Advisor product to the service so open-source projects can fix security issues in their Web applications as the code is written and without becoming security experts.

“There are now more than 2,200 of the world’s leading open-source projects, including Linux, Apache Hadoop, Apache HBase, Python, PostgreSQL and many more,” said Chilton.

The Coverity Scan service is continuing to gain momentum in the open-source community because it allows developers to easily find and fix defects that further improve the state of open-source software quality. Since its introduction, the Coverity Scan service has analyzed almost 400 billion lines of open-source code. Recently, the company opened up access to the Coverity Scan service to anyone interested in viewing the progress of participating open source projects. As “Project Observers,” these individuals can also view high-level data about the projects they are tracking, including the number of outstanding defects, fixed defects, and defect density.

Synopsys acquisition strengthens offerings
Earlier this year, Coverity was acquired by Synopsys, a leader in electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor intellectual property. For Synopsys, the Coverity acquisition represents an important expansion into the adjacent and emerging software quality, security, and test market which is relevant in the semiconductor and systems space.  Coverity will continue to help organizations in all industries and geographies deliver better software faster.

“Synopsys saw the rise in important of software quality and security within its own organization and among its customers,” said Chilton. “Synopsys has been using the Coverity platform since 2005 and has achieved a ‘Coverity clean status’ on more than 200 million lines of code, meaning that all Coverity-found defects have been addressed.”

Coverity plans to increase its innovation in the quality, security and testing space, growing its technology portfolio organically and inorganically to extend its leadership into the broader software testing market.

“We will continue to deliver the deepest, most accurate quality and security analysis algorithms,” said Chilton. “Organizations can no longer afford to ship buggy software which is why the market leaders have turned to Coverity. With our help, they are delivering higher quality, secure software to the market faster.”

For more information, visit www.coverity.com.