Firefox Analyzed for Bugs by Software

eldavojohn writes "In a brief article on CNet, a company named Coverity announced that Firefox is using software to detect flaws in Firefox's source code. Even more interesting is the DHS initiative for Coverity to use this same bug detection software on 40 open source projects." An interesting tidbit from the article: "Most of the 40 programs tested averaged less than one defect per thousand lines of code. The cleanest program was XMMS, a Unix-based multimedia application. It had only six bugs in its 116,899 lines of code, or .51 bugs per thousands lines of code. The buggiest program is the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, or AMANDA, a Linux backup application first developed at the University of Maryland. Coverity found 108 bugs in its 88,950 lines of code, or about 1.214 bugs per thousand lines of code." We've covered this before, only now Firefox is actually licensing the Coverity software and using it directly.

Comments

Re:this slashdot news is already outdated

[StrawberryFrog]

there are already multiple projects who have brought there bugs down to zero.

You mean "who have brought down the count of their bugs that this tool can detect down to zero." I'm sure they will have other bugs in code and design.

How does this tool compare to tools that do analysis by introspection on bytecode from languages like C# and Java. I use FxCop on C# code, and while it is very cool, using it is not newsworthy at all. Does this tool do more? Is is the news that it's used in a high-profile C++ program?

Integrating tools like this into your build process may be cutting-edge best-practice at present, but give it a while.