Eng-Tips Whitepaper Library » Programming

voke Research Market Mover Array Report: Testing Platforms

Coverity — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:02:01 +0000

voke Names Coverity as a Transformational Company in the Testing Market

Coverity has been rated as a Transformational company in the voke, inc. Market Mover Array™ Report for Testing Platforms. Coverity’s rating is recognition of the impact that Coverity’s software integrity strategy is making in shaping the future of the testing market.

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How Does C++ Relate to Smart Grid?

Zen Kishimoto — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:40:44 +0000

This is a quiz. What is the relationship between C++ and smart grid? One of Fujitsu’s smart grid symposium sessions this week was a keynote speech by Bjarne Stroustrup of Texas A&M University.

Bjarne Stroustrup

He is the creator of the C++ language.

C++ was conceived from C and Simula.

I would not mind talking about C++ and other programming languages for the next ten blog posts, but this is a blog about energy efficiency, green IT, cloud computing, and smart grid. It is Fujitsu’s fault for choosing him as a keynote speaker, which brought my mind back to pure IT.

In any event, as more and more objects are equipped with the ability to send messages back and forth, the "Internet of things” is everywhere.

The theme of Stroustrup’s presentation was how to bridge the gap between applications and hardware using C++ and C++0x (the latest standard version), as shown here.

Bridge the gap between applications and hardware using C++ and C++0x.

After talking about what is not an infrastructure, he listed the necessary conditions for being an infrastructure.

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		The Different Types of UPS systems
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What is required of infrastructure?

He also mentioned the difficulty in programming in the gap, which is supposed to connect applications and hardware. He said the interaction between the lowest layer of the infrastructure and hardware is very complex. For example, Intel has about 200 software engineers working on a compiler to produce appropriate code to link the lowest layer and hardware.

Programming in the gap is difficult.

So the question is, how do you implement such "things” in an efficient way? And the answer is to use C++. See the next picture.

Why C++?

Stroustrup did not say so explicitly, but he was talking about embedded systems. In the world of embedded systems, unlike the world of the Web, C and C++ still dominate. C can be very low-level language and interact well with hardware without requiring a lot of such resource. C++ is replacing C because C++ improves many of C’s problems, but I am not going there in this blog.

His conclusion as to how to bridge applications and hardware is given in the following slide.

Cut Time, Not Corners: 5 Steps to Efficiently Manage Defects across Shared Code

Coverity — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:33:52 +0000

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 Ensures Quality of 3rd Party Code

Coverity — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:18:58 +0000

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 Improves Product Quality While Saving Over 2,500 Engineering Hours with Coverity

Coverity — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:04:39 +0000

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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Frequentis Standardizes on Coverity Static Analysis for Safety-Critical Software Integrity

Coverity — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:24:59 +0000

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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Best Practices for Creating Defect Resolution Processes that Trigger Developer Adoption using Static Analysis

Coverity — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:19:45 +0000

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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Effective Management of Static Analysis Vulnerabilities and Defects

Coverity — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:11:55 +0000

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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Managing Software Integrity in an Agile World

Coverity — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:01:19 +0000

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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Improving Software Quality to Drive Business Agility

Coverity — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:05:25 +0000

This white paper presents IDC’s analysis of current quality and defect amelioration strategies and market trends, and it offers guidance for best practice approaches. It also provides findings from a recent IDC survey as context for this analysis. During 2Q08, IDC conducted a survey of 139 North American companies that forms the basis for data analyzed in this paper. IT management, IT operations, and software development represented 86% of those responding (with 50% being in IT management). Some of the areas explored include:

- Code base complexity compared to 2 years ago
- Frequency of production application updates
- Code Review / quality strategies
- # of critical bugs found within 12 months of release
- # of days to correct a defect in the field

In the context of the above findings, IDC then briefly looks at the product offerings of Coverity, an automated source code analysis tools vendor. Coverity Thread Analyzer for Java, which was released in 2Q08, observes code as it is executed and identifies race conditions and deadlocks.

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