Coverity's Analysis of One Billion Lines of Code Leads To New Prevent Software Quality System for Java, C/C++
Unique Software DNA Mapping Technology Finds 30 Percent More Defects; Brings Unified Defect Management To All Projects Across An Organization

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1, 2007 – Coverity, Inc., the leader in improving software quality and security, today announced the general availability of Coverity Prevent , the first automated solution that identifies and resolves the most critical defects in C, C++ and Java source code.

The technological foundation for Prevent is Coverity's patent-pending Software DNA Mapping technology, which enables rapid and accurate defect checks through 100 percent of the paths in any piece of software. Coverity Prevent leverages this unique software mapping technology to find 30 percent more defects in Java, C and C++ software projects.

“Mapping the complete source code in an application is vital to being able to find and fix the most critical errors. Coverity's technology is a major step in that direction,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder and CEO of voke, an industry analyst firm focused on software application lifecycle issues. “In the real world, it is no longer enough to simply identify defects in source code. Coverity Prevent can help businesses find, manage, and fix software defects much faster than traditional methods. Discovering, managing, and fixing defects more quickly equates to greater customer satisfaction and accelerated time-to-market.”

Coverity Prevent is the result of analyzing one billion lines of software source code and working with more than 200 sophisticated software development organizations. During the development of Prevent, Coverity worked with software teams that sought to ensure code quality in complex software projects that were spread across multiple groups in multiple sites around the world. In nearly all cases, the challenges in automatic defect discovery and efficient remediation were the same: build systems are ad-hoc and heterogeneous, and automatically understanding how software is built from source files is a crucial step; a source code file does not make sense in isolation from the other source files in the eventual running program; and, quite simply, a defect in the code will not fix itself.

In understanding these challenges, Coverity Prevent delivers:

• Software DNA Map — The industry’s first and only technology to leverage an existing build system to automatically create a complete and accurate map of the source code
• Multiple Analysis Engines — The industry’s first and only technology that analyzes a representation of the source code that most closely resembles the resulting executable to understand many distinct aspects of the code
• Resolution System — The industry’s first and only technology that allows organizations to mirror their existing software quality process in the method they use to remediate defects discovered automatically

“There is no other automatic system in the world that can do with source code what we can do. After analyzing one billion lines of code, we have come to understand that identifying software defects is only one part of improving software quality,” said Ben Chelf, CTO of Coverity. “By understanding build systems automatically, understanding code automatically, and plugging in a workflow system that developers want to use, we now have a new solution to the software quality problem that customers can deploy quickly and easily.”

For years, commercial and enterprise software developers have looked for products that could automatically and effectively find software defects early in the development cycle. Fixing software bugs early can dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring a software product to market and also potentially save millions of dollars in costly product recalls. However, there were many false starts for tools that looked to discover defects automatically because of their failure to grasp a complete picture of the software.

Avid Technology, Inc. was a beta customer of Prevent. “Coverity Prevent has a strong understanding of our code structure and how it works with third-party libraries,” said Don Schuler, director of engineering services at Avid, the world leader in digital nonlinear media creation, management and distribution solutions for film, video, audio, animation, games and broadcast. “The result is that their defect resolution tools have been very effective in finding and resolving bugs early in application development while also delivering a low false positive rate. Coverity has saved us significant time and cost, and is a valuable tool in providing the high level of reliability and functionality that our customers - the world's top content creators - require.”

Coverity Prevent is available immediately. It can be licensed on an annual basis from Coverity and pricing is based on the number of lines of code to be analyzed.

Prevent supports all major compilers and language extensions:

• Supports all C/C++ standard code including C89, C99 and ISO/IEC C++
• Compiles Java source code and parses Java bytecode
• Supports compilers from ANSI, ARM, GCC, Green Hills, HP, IAR Systems, Intel, Marvell, Microsoft, PICC, QNX, Renesas, Texas Instruments, Wind River and others

About Coverity
Coverity, the leader in improving software quality and security, is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco. Coverity's groundbreaking technology removes the barriers to writing and delivering complex software by automatically finding and helping to fix critical software defects and security vulnerabilities as the software is written. More than 200 leading companies choose Coverity because it scales to tens of millions of lines of code, has the lowest false positive rate and provides 100 percent path coverage. Companies such as Juniper Networks, Symantec/VERITAS, McAfee, Synopsys, NASA, Palm and Wind River work with Coverity's tools to find and fix security and quality defects in their mission-critical code.

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

Russ Wood
Director, Corporate Marketing
rwood@coverity.com
+1 415 694 5304

Craig Oda
Page One PR for Coverity
coda@pageonepr.com
+1 650 565 9800 x702