Leading Open Source Software Projects Eliminate Bugs Every Six Minutes After Coverity Scan
Department of Homeland Security research by Coverity shows open source developers on 32 most popular projects fix defects on average every six minutes within first week of results posted publicly

LINUXWORLD, BOSTON, April 3 – Coverity, Inc., makers of the world’s most advanced and scalable source code analysis solution, today announced preliminary findings showing that open source developers fixed a software defect every six minutes in the week following Coverity’s analysis for the DHS that established a baseline metric for software quality. In seven days, the defect density for 32 open source projects analyzed dropped from 0.434 defects per thousand lines of code to 0.371 defects. Samba, a widely used open source project used to connect Linux and Windows networks, showed the fastest developer response, reducing software defects in Samba from 216 to 18 in the first seven days.

“Coverity found bugs in parts of Samba that we had previously considered completely robust and tested,” said Jeremy Allison, head of the Samba development team. “Coverity is making a major contribution to the code quality of the Samba project.”

“My impression is that the open source community is producing software defect patches at an extremely fast rate,” said Ben Chelf, CTO of Coverity. “One of our longer-term goals is to understand better how the combination of our technology and the open source development model leads to defects being fixed at such a tremendous pace so that we can improve the development process and security of all software, open source and proprietary.”

In the first seven days, more than 200 open source developers registered to gain secure access to the online defect database and used the information to resolve more than 900 defects. This is an average of more than 5 bug fixes an hour. Developers for the Amanda and XMMS projects eliminated all software defects that the Coverity analysis detected. The maintainers of Amanda subsequently released a major version (2.5) of the popular backup and recovery software highlighting the milestone of 0 outstanding Coverity defects.

Although the three-year DHS contract, “Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation Open Source Hardening Project,” was just announced in January, the project is already making a positive impact on the development of some open source projects. Within the first week of Coverity’s analysis, X.org, the makers of the widely used X Window open source software found in major distributions of Linux, Solaris, and others, discovered that Coverity found a major security vulnerability which allows any user with a login to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service with root privileges. A security advisory was broadcast shortly thereafter resulting in patches from vendors.

According to Allison, “Using Coverity’s source code analysis technology is like having a developer on the team with an inhuman attention to detail, who points out all the corner cases and boundary conditions developers didn’t considered when they first wrote the code.”

Highlights of the initial review of open source developer response are shown below:

Project Name	Original Defect Count March 6, 2006	Week 1 Defect Count March 13, 2006	Week 2 Defect Count March 20, 2006
Amanda	108	0	0
XMMS	6	0	0
Samba	216	18	0
Ethereal	143	19	19
Icecast	12	2	2
SQLite	31	10	6
Gcc	140	99	97
Gaim	113	57	51
Net-SNMP	148	87	61

An updated table of summary results, access to the secure database of defects, and an explanation of the research is available at http://scan.coverity.com/ .

Coverity CEO Talks about LAMP Quality and Security at LinuxWorld Boston
Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity, will talk about the quality and security of the LAMP stack at LinuxWorld Boston on April 4, 2006 from 2:30pm to 3:30pm. His talk, “Get the Facts on LAMP Applications Quality and Security,” will provide additional information on Coverity’s ongoing analysis of open source software.

About Coverity
Coverity ( http://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 computer scientists whose four-year research project resulted in a breakthrough technique to address 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 100 leading companies to significantly improve the quality and security of their software, including Juniper Networks, Symantec/VERITAS, McAfee, Synopsys, NASA, PalmOne, Sun Microsystems and Wind River.

NOTE: 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.

Coverity LinuxWorld Boston Booth #34

Media Contacts
Craig Oda
Page One PR for Coverity
coda@pageonepr.com
+1 650 565 9800 x102

David Park
dave@coverity.com
+1-650-714-2335