Bangalore: Coverity, a development testing company, announced the availability of the 2012 Coverity Scan Open Source Report. The report details the analysis of more than 450 million lines of software code through the Coverity Scan service, the single largest sample size that the report has studied to date. The service, which began as the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source software integrity, was initiated between Coverity and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006 and is now managed by Coverity.
The Coverity Scan report has become a widely accepted standard for measuring the state of open source software quality. Over the past seven years, the Coverity Scan service has analyzed nearly 850 million lines of code from more than 300 open source projects including Linux, PHP and Apache, and an anonymous sample of nearly 300 of Coverity's customers.
Here are the key findings from the 2012 Coverity Scan Open Source Report:
1 Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software�and both continue to surpass the accepted industry standard for good software quality:
Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. Coverity's analysis found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects that leverage the Coverity Scan service, and an average defect density of .68 for proprietary code developed by Coverity enterprise customers. Both have better quality as compared to the accepted industry standard defect density for good quality software of 1.0. This marks the second, consecutive year that both open source code and proprietary code scanned by Coverity have achieved defect density below 1.0.
