Coverity Releases The 2011 Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report (Scan)

The 2011 Coverity (News - Alert) Scan Open Source Integrity Report (Scan) reported that the quality of open source code is as good or even better than proprietary software.

Open source code is as good in quality as that of proprietary software, according to the conclusion taken by The 2011 Coverity Scan Open Source (News - Alert) Integrity Report (Scan), a public-private sector research project. The research project was started by Coverity and the US Department of Homeland Security in 2006. To reach the conclusion, researchers tested over 300 million lines of proprietary software code and over 37 million lines of open source software code, the company stated in a press release.

On the basis of these findings, the research says, “Open source code quality is as good as proprietary code quality specially in the cases where similar size codebases were compared. Linux 2.6 has a defect density of 0.62 which is almost similar to that of its proprietary codebase counterparts. Linux 2.6 is a project with nearly 7 million lines of code.”

The report stated that an average open source project in Scan has 832,000 lines of code. The report analyzed code from 45 of the most active Scan open source projects. The average defect density or the number of defects per thousand lines of code in the open source projects in Scan was 0.45. On the other hand, over 300 million lines of code from around 41 proprietary codebases were taken into account. In this case, the average defect density was found to be 0.64, the company has stated.

Recently, the company announced that it will demonstrate its solution for finding and fixing security vulnerabilities during development at RSA (News - Alert) Conference 2012, Booth #555. Coverity helps development organizations find and fix software defects that can lead to catastrophic failures and security vulnerabilities as code is written. By automating code testing in development with Coverity, security vulnerabilities are presented to developers in the same way as quality defects.