Coverity
Releases New Version of Source Code Analyzer With Ability
to Detect Hard-to-Find Concurrency Problems
Eclipse IDE integration, Windriver Workbench integration,
extensive management views, and Mac OS X support also
added
SAN FRANCISCO, December 13,
2005 – Coverity, Inc., makers of the
world's most advanced and scalable source code analysis
solution, today announced the general availability of
Coverity Prevent 2.3, a new version of their flagship
product that can automatically identify concurrent programming
defects in source code. Prior to this new version of
Coverity Prevent, these errors were extremely difficult
to diagnose through traditional testing and could result
in potentially catastrophic and unpredictable program
behavior.
“We’ve found Coverity Prevent to be an
excellent tool to help us uncover programming errors,”
said Paul Hemson, distinguished engineer, Director of
QA at McAfee software. “Coverity could pay for
itself by finding a single concurrency defect. These
are extremely expensive defects to isolate and fix by
traditional methods.”
“Concurrency is a costly problem that is extremely
difficult to solve,” said Theresa Lanowitz, research
director at Gartner. “Software development organizations
that deal with concurrent programming will see significant
cost savings from a solution that finds these defects
early in the development cycle.”
Concurrent programming has become ubiquitous in many
products, ranging from highly responsive user interfaces
to massively parallel server clusters in networked environments.
As software programs become more complex, different
parts of a program are frequently required to work in
parallel, often resulting in software defects that are
difficult to replicate and debug. Concurrency problems
such as race conditions and deadlocks may take months
to find because the problem is often the result of complex
interactions, such as event timings, that are not easily
replicated.
New dual-core processors from AMD, IBM, Sun, and Intel
have also contributed to the rise in frustrating defects
stemming from concurrent programming. In order to efficiently
use dual-core processors, developers must use concurrent
programming techniques effectively. To support the growth
of concurrent programming, Intel and Microsoft recently
added support for the OpenMP Application Program Interface
for concurrent programming to their respective compilers.
“Exploiting the performance gains from new dual-core
processors will lead to a crisis in software quality
unless new programming tools are developed,” said
Dr. Dawson Engler, associate professor of computer science
at Stanford University and chief scientist at Coverity.
“With its ability to cover 100% of all paths,
static source code analysis is ideally suited to finding
concurrent programming errors in large projects.”
As one of the most difficult and abstract programming
concepts, concurrency raises complex issues that require
a great deal of training and experience to be utilized
properly. However, in many cases development teams short
on manpower will assign inexperienced developers to
handle complex concurrency issues. This leads to software
defects that have proven nearly impossible to debug
with existing tools.
This release of Coverity Prevent focuses on solving
three concurrency problems:
- Double locks and missing unlocks;
- Incorrect lock ordering;
- Blocking operations within critical sections.
The new concurrency analyzer finds deadlocks caused
by double locks, missing unlocks and lock ordering violations.
It also finds cases where “blocking” functions
may be called with locks held. These errors can lead
to severe and unpredictable performance degradation.
Coverity has also strengthened their partnership with
IBM in this release by joining the “Ready for
Rational” program. In addition to the Intel and
AMD platforms, Coverity Prevent now supports IBM PowerPC-based
systems from Apple Computer and the Mac OS X operating
system.
In addition to the new integration with IBM’s
Eclipse platform, Coverity Prevent also now integrates
with Windriver’s Workbench IDE.
Coverity Prevent also now comes with extensive management
views designed to allow development managers to quickly
understand the quality of software produced by their
development teams. Managers can now see architectural
metrics, detect problem areas, evaluate how code base
quality and security evolves over a release cycle, and
compare results across releases, builds, and components.
About Coverity
Coverity (www.coverity.com), makers of the world's most
advanced and scalable source code analysis solution
for pinpointing software defects and security vulnerabilities,
is a privately-held company headquartered in San Francisco.
Coverity was founded in 2002 by leading Stanford University
scientists whose four-year research project resulted
in a breakthrough approach for addressing the costliest
problem in the software industry. That research breakthrough
allows developers to quickly and precisely eliminate
software defects and security vulnerabilities in tens
of millions of lines of new or legacy code. Today, Coverity's
solution is used by more than 85 leading companies to
significantly improve the quality of their software,
including Juniper Networks, Symantec/VERITAS, McAfee,
Synopsys, NASA, PalmOne, Sun Microsystems and Wind River.
Coverity is a registered trademark, and Coverity Extend
and Coverity Prevent are trademarks of Coverity, Inc.
All other company and product names are the property
of their respective owners.
Media Contacts
Craig Oda
Page One PR for Coverity
coda@pageonepr.com
(303) 462-3057
David Park
dave@coverity.com
(415) 321-5204
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