450 Million Lines of Code Can't Be Wrong: How Open Source Stacks Up

An anonymous reader writes "A new report details the analysis of more than 450 million lines of software through the Coverity Scan service, which began as the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source software integrity, and was initiated between Coverity and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006. Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software — and both continue to surpass the industry standard for software quality. Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. The analysis found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects, and an average defect density of .68 for proprietary code."

Comments

Defects fixed for proprietary may differ.

[CodeReign]

Propietary defects are ones that may cause financial harm. FOSS defects are ones that cause annoyance.

I know that our code has more defects than we'd consider fixing purely because the CBA isn't there.

Re:it contradicts the definition

[GrugVoth]

We use coverity where I work on proprietary code and part of their service is to report, anonymously obviously, the defect count, type and lines of code etc back to coverity if you want to. Via this they can get an idea of the defects found using their tool over a very large code base.