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Firefox Analyzed for Bugs by Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the killing-bugs-dead dept.

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.

2 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Errr... by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I hope these Coverity guys aren't pompous enough to think that their tool can find ALL bugs in a program with... magic...

    Hmm, they should run their tool on its own source code, that would be fun.

  2. Check the checker by Mini-Geek · · Score: 0, Redundant

    But what checks Coverity for bugs? Coverity? What if it has a bug-checking bug causing it to not see its own bug.

    --
    do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
    until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);