Quality-assurance solution provider Optimyth Software recently announced Kiuwan, a new cloud platform that lets developers measure and analyze the quality of their application’s code in the early stages of the software development life cycle, before they test their applications.

The Kiuwan platform uses static code analysis to analyze the risk and compliance of applications built in the ABAP IV, C#, COBOL, Java (including some Android support), JSP, PL/SQL, SQL, VB.NET and VB6 programming languages. The company said support for C/C++, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP and extended support for Android in Java will be added in September.

Kiuwan also helps developers gather information on the kind of defects that can be detected with static code analysis. “For example, we don’t run the application to see what happens when you click a button,” explained Javier Salado, marketing and business development director at Optimyth. “That [kind of defect] is covered by unit testing and functional testing.”

Salado said that the defects Kiuwan can detect are ones that could break an application, and added that Kiuwan can find them even before the application is built. “For example, having if(a=1) instead of if(a==1) can break your application in many different ways, but can be difficult to detect with functional testing,” he said. “We can detect this defect and other code patterns that can be harmful. We can detect compliance defects and non-functional defects that affect the efficiency or reliability of your application before you run performance tests.”

Kiuwan gathers information on defects based on rules, Salado said. “You can modify the rules if you want, but we give you a standard set of rules, a standard set of metrics to run,” he said. “All these rules are compliant to the ISO 9126, which is a standard that basically recommends characteristics of software quality.”

If a developer’s application meets the five characteristics in what is known as Kiuwan’s Global Quality Indicator, then, Salado said, developers will remain compliant to ISO and can be assured of their application’s quality. “The five characteristics we measure are maintainability, reliability, efficiency, portability and security,” he explained. “ISO actually gives you more, but those are the five that we have implemented into our quality model. Basically, they measure the things that the ISO 9126—and the ISO 25010, which is the evolution of the ISO 9126—tells you to measure.”

Salado added that its Quality Indicator is based on the ISO 9126, but that it does not cover usability because usability cannot be measured with static code analysis, he said.

For developers concerned about uploading their code outside their firewalls for analysis, Salado said they can download the Kiuwan analyzers to their infrastructure to run the static analysis locally. “This is software that you can easily install,” he said. “The software uploads only the results to the cloud, so you can still track the quality of your software from the cloud platform while your code stays secure.”

Salado said another benefit of being able to run the analysis locally is that developers can integrate it with their continuous-deployment process. He said it works with continuous-integration and continuous-deployment tools Bamboo, ElectricCommander, ElectricDeploy, Hudson, Jenkins and uDeploy. He added that developers can also export Kiuwan to Atlassian’s JIRA issue tracker.

Developers can start using Kiuwan for free, and can continuously analyze up to three applications if they are smaller than 25,000 lines of code. “By ‘continuously analyze,’ we mean, as often as you need,” Salado explained. “The code-analysis should be part of the continuous deployment/integration process, so you can analyze on every check-in, every build, every deploy—whatever makes sense to you. Kiuwan does not have any restrictions or charge extra in the number of analyses.”

If you need to analyze bigger applications, Salado said it will cost $10 per month for any extra application. “Once you start paying, your minimum application size goes up to 100,000 lines of code,” he added.

Along with the Kiuwan platform, Optimyth also recently announced the free Kiuwan Early Adopters program. The first 50 companies to join will get unlimited access to the platform for a full year. The offer ends Aug. 31, Salado said.