When working on projects with large codebases that re-use components, it can be hard to identify which projects and products are affected by defects in shared code. How do you understand the impact of defects in your shared components? How do you analyze and prioritize the defects in your shared components so you know what to fix first, or not at all? How do you effectively track defect status and history across shared code?

Attend this webcast and you will learn five steps you can take to make the process of finding and fixing defects across shared code more efficient to increase developer productivity and reduce the risk of a schedule slip.

In this 30 minutes session you will learn:

• How to effectively scan your software to identify hard to spot defects in shared code
• How to identify which projects and products are impacted by defects to prioritize which defects should be fixed first
• What actions and best practices are needed to ensure the necessary fixes are implemented to prevent defects from entering the field

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ip.access is the leader in developing innovative technology for IP and Mobile connectivity. To meet consumer demand for their products, ip.access developers and external development partners need to collaborate to deliver top notch code under tight timetables.

With more than 3.6 million lines of C/C++ and Java code, development leaders at ip.access recognized that unit tests and manual peer review were becoming too labor intensive to stay on the company’s development timeline. Therefore, the company elected to create a continuous integration development process that would accelerate the ability of both internal and external teams to ensure the quality of their combined code. A key component in this process would be the use of static analysis to evaluate code prior to run-time.

ip.access selected Coverity Prevent as its static analysis solution because Prevent automatically finds a high concentration of critical software defects with the lowest false positive rate in the industry. In fact, ip.access reports false-positive rates at or below 5%. Because these analysis results are so accurate, developers at ip.access and its development partner can now avoid a significant amount of time-consuming manual code reviews and can check in code with greater confidence.

"During our preliminary trial process, Coverity Prevent identified 27 ‘must-fix’ defects in our draft code," said Jason Cooper, Senior Software Engineer at ip.access. "With results like that, selecting Coverity was a quick decision for us."

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Schneider Electric (Schneider) is a global leader in energy management, developing solutions to make energy safe, reliable, efficient, and productive from plant to plug.

Schneider Electric has adopted Coverity to improve product quality and software integrity while reducing development costs and re-focusing resources on innovation, benefits which have been realized within the development organization, across the company, and supported at the highest level within Schneider Electric management.

"We run the analysis from a centralized team and send out an email one week later announcing the results are available for the developers to review. If there is ever a delay in getting this information out to the developers, they come to us and seek it out. Not a single developer did this in the past. Now we have developers demanding Coverity."
- Frank Klosek, Qualimetry and Senior Technical Manager

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For customers of Sun Microsystems’ long-term storage products, quality is rarely an issue. Sun is a global leader in network computing infrastructure solutions with well-known brands such as Java, Solaris, MySQL, and StorageTek.

In a highly competitive market, companies like Sun constantly need to increase quality and reliability, speed delivery, and reduce costs just to stay even with its rivals. Coverity Static Analysis is a great addition to help not only achieve these objectives, but also surpass them. It has proven to be a tool that can find defects earlier, which reduces development costs and accelerates time to market.

Using Coverity Static Analysis also results in higher quality products in the field because there is more complete coverage of exception handling code in testing. Finally, the real-time feedback improves software developers’ coding skills resulting in fewer testers needed relative to the number of developers. These benefits help Sun and its already award-winning products to not just stay on par with the competition, but widen the gap between Sun and its challengers.

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Frequentis develops highly reliable communication and information systems for safety-critical applications. Its market leading control centre solutions, products and services are used by customers in a variety of mission critical public and private fields such as air traffic control (civil and military); emergency services (police, fire departments, and ambulances); maritime systems; and railways and public transport. Safety and freedom of failure is the single most important objective for Frequentis.

Frequentis’ mission and commitment to safety is engrained into every part of the company, and the software quality organization is a direct reflection of this commitment. Coverity has helped Frequentis ensure a high level of software integrity to support its product mission of freedom from failure, while continually improving the productivity of its developers.

According to Andreas Gerstinger, Software Quality and Software Safety Engineer, who drove the evaluation and introduction of Coverity Static Analysis into the organization, "We had used other analysis tools in the past but they did not go as deep as Coverity–they only provided metrics such as complexity measurement–but did not go as far as finding faults and pinpointing where they reside in the code. Developers didn’t want a tool that only showed them abstract metrics, but would instead show them exactly where they made a coding error."

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The quest for efficiency improvement raises questions regarding the optimal air temperature for data centers. The ASHRAE TC-9.9 committee has recently adopted an extension of the recommended thermal envelope for server inlet temperature and humidity. A popular hypothesis suggests that total energy demands should diminish as the server inlet temperatures increase. This paper tests that hypothesis through the development of a composite power consumption baseline for a mixture of servers as a function of inlet temperature and applying this data to a variety of cooling architectures.

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The trend of increasing heat densities in data centers has held consistent with advances in computing technology for many years. As power density increased, it became evident that the degree of difficulty in cooling these higher power demand loads was also increasing. In recent years, traditional cooling system design has proven inadequate to remove concentrated heat loads (up to and greater than 20 kW per rack). This has driven an architectural shift in data center cooling. The advent of a newer cooling architecture that was designed for the higher densities has brought with it increased efficiencies for the data center. This article discusses the efficiency benefits of row-based cooling compared to two other common cooling architectures.

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Traditional methodologies for monitoring the data center environment are no longer sufficient. With technologies such as blade servers driving up cooling demands and regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley driving up data security requirements, the physical environment in the data center must be watched more closely. While well understood protocols exist for monitoring physical devices such as UPS systems, computer room air conditioners, and fire suppression systems, there is a class of distributed monitoring points that is often ignored. This paper describes this class of threats, suggests approaches to deploying monitoring devices, and provides best practices in leveraging the collected data to reduce downtime.

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High-density servers offer a significant performance per watt benefit. However, depending on the deployment, they can present a significant cooling challenge. Vendors are now designing servers that can demand over 40 kW of cooling per rack. With most data centers designed to cool an average of no more than 2 kW per rack, innovative strategies must be used for proper cooling of high-density equipment. This paper provides ten approaches for increasing cooling efficiency, cooling capacity, and power density in existing data centers.

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Despite advances in computer technology, power outages continue to be a major cause of PC and server downtime. Protecting computer systems with Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) hardware is part of a total solution, but power management software is also necessary to prevent data corruption after extended power outages. Various software configurations are discussed, and best practices aimed at ensuring uptime are presented.

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Whether you are evaluating static analysis in your development cycle or already using static analysis today, learn what every development team needs to know, including what to look for when evaluating static analysis solutions, how to minimize the risk that noise and false positive rates pose to successful deployments, how to measure and report on quality, and ease of adoption. Includes live demonstration of Coverity Prevent, the static analysis solution of choice for scanning billions of lines of mission-critical code at over 600 companies and government agencies worldwide.

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[via UC Berkeley Press Release]
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 08 December 2009

BERKELEY — The 2009 H1N1 influenza virus used a new strategy to cross from birds into humans, a warning that it has more than one trick up its sleeve to jump the species barrier and become virulent.

The sequence of the three subunits of the influenza virus polymerase (center) determines whether or not the enzyme works efficiently in birds, pigs or humans. A mutation in the PB2 subunit allows the bird virus to function in humans, as does switching out the bird PA subunit for a human PA subunit. Two mutations in the PB2 subunit of 2009 H1N1 allow the pig virus to work in humans. The background is a false-color electron micrograph image of influenza virions. (Andrew Mehle/UC Berkeley)

In a report in this week’s early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, researchers show that the H1N1, or swine flu, virus adopted a new mutation in one of its genes distinct from the mutations found in previous flu viruses, including those responsible for the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, the “Asian” flu pandemic in 1957 and the “Hong Kong” pandemic of 1968.

Previous influenza strains that crossed from birds into people had a specific point mutation in the bird virus’s polymerase gene that allowed the protein to operate efficiently inside humans as well. The polymerase transcribes the virus’s RNA, allowing the host to express viral genes, and also copies the viral genome, needed to make new viruses.

The 2009 H1N1 virus retains the bird version of the polymerase, but has a second mutation that seems to suppress the ability of human cells to prevent the bird polymerase from working.

“We were quite shocked when we looked at the swine flu virus, which was clearly replicating in people and other mammalian systems, yet had a polymerase that looked like it was derived from a bird virus, which should not function too well in a human cell type,” said UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Andrew Mehle of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. “The other mutation within the polymerase seems to compensate and allow the enzyme to function.”

The researchers also discovered another strategy – one not yet adopted by any known flu virus – by which influenza virus can increase its virulence even more. When a particular human subunit is substituted for one of the three protein subunits that make up the bird polymerase, the new combination makes the polymerase more efficient in human cells.

“This is an extremely rare mutation and a rare combination, which suggests that there may be other ways that haven’t emerged yet that these viruses are going to continue to evolve,” said Jennifer Doudna, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.”

She suggested that those monitoring influenza outbreaks around the world in search of new variants be on the lookout for this recombination of polymerase subunits, which could herald an uptick in swine flu virulence. The findings also could help scientists develop better antiviral treatments, Mehle and Doudna said.

“The more we can understand the biochemistry and the particular structure of these polymerase complexes, the better we can make rational decisions about drug development,” Mehle said.

H1N1, which appeared on the scene earlier this year, was dubbed swine flu because it emerged from pigs, in which human, bird and pig influenza viruses mixed, swapped genes and gave rise to a variant that could infect human cells and reproduce.

While mutations in the surface protein hemagglutinin – indicated by the H in H1N1 – are key to allowing the virus to enter human cells, mutations in the polymerase enzyme are key to the virus’s ability to replicate inside human cells. All previous flu strains that entered and were transmitted in humans had a single mutation in the second subunit of the bird polymerase gene, which apparently allowed the enzyme to operate in human cells.

Last year, Mehle and Doudna showed that human cells apparently prevent the three subunits of bird virus polymerases from assembling into a functioning enzyme. A single amino acid switch at position 627 on the second subunit of the polymerase overcomes that inhibition and allows the virus to replicate. Apparently, Mehle said, when the amino acid glutamic acid – typical of most bird virus polymerases – is changed to a lysine, typical of human polymerases, the surface charge of the subunit changes from acidic (negatively charged) to basic (positively charged) and allows assembly of the subunits. Previous studies in mammals have shown that a lysine in that position enhances polymerase activity, increases viral replication and transmission, and in some cases, is associated with increased pathogenicity and death.

In their new study, Mehle and Doudna found that H1N1 has two rare mutations in the second subunit: a serine at position 590 and an arginine at position 591. This combination, which is most common in pigs, apparently has the same effect on surface charge as the mutation at position 627, allowing the polymerase complex to form and function in human cells.

Mehle noted that, in addition to such point mutations, flu viruses also mix and match the three subunits. Both the 1957 and 1968 viruses had polymerases composed of a first subunit from a bird and the other two subunits from humans. H1N1 has a human-like first subunit, while the second and third are bird-like – hence the need for a mutation in the second subunit to make it more human-like.

To see which other combinations might make H1N1 more virulent, they mixed human, avian and pig subunits in culture, replicating the pig “mixing vessel,” Mehle said. Several combinations with a human third subunit increased the activity of the polymerase enzyme when other mutations were not present in the second subunit. Viruses with this alteration are now being tested in human cell culture to see if they are more virulent.

“In addition to having individual amino acid changes affecting the ability of the virus to transmit across species and be more pathogenic, we need to think about these entire gene segments being exchanged back and forth,” said Doudna, who also is a faculty affiliate of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). “Those will affect the outcome of disease.”

“We are very hopeful that the kind of basic science that we are doing here will have an impact on human health, either at the level of diagnostics or thinking forward to development of antiviral therapeutics,” she added.

Mehle and Doudna continue to explore the polymerase to discover what in human cells prevents the assembly of the bird polymerase, and to determine the three-dimensional structure of the enzyme and its three subunits.

The work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.

Whether your organization utilizes an agile or waterfall development methodology, the addition of static analysis will bring about a change in the way your development team thinks about their code. This is because an accurate static analysis tool is a source of information that demands the attention of developers, QA testers, and managers alike. Read this white paper to learn best practices for managing statically detected defects, as well as how to set the right static analysis defect reduction goals for you and your team.

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Bridging the gap between CAD and GIS, AutoCAD Map 3D allows engineering and GIS professionals to work with the same data, and enables design processes to integrate geospatial functions in a single environment for more efficient workflows.

This results in better designs, increased productivity, and better data quality. View this screencast to learn about the top five ways AutoCAD Map 3D can help you improve your infrastructure design process.

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Software integrity experts Mark Donsky and George Swan, Ph.D, from Coverity present how static analysis supports Agile to automate testing and find defects earlier in the development cycle, enforces in-cycle QA to share the quality responsibility across QA and development, and is used at Coverity to support its own development processes to deliver high quality, error-free code faster.

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