Coverity, Inc., the leader in development testing, today announced that due to extraordinary demand for the annual Coverity Scan(TM) Report and the insight it provides into the state of open source software quality, Coverity will create and release a new series of Coverity Scan Project Spotlights, beginning with the popular Samba project. Each month, Coverity will highlight an open source project and analyze the quality of its software, including defect density as compared to the industry average defect density for good quality software and types of defects identified. The Project Spotlight will also include an interview with a key contributor or maintainer for the project.
Samba, which was one of the initial open source projects included in the Coverity Scan service, is the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix. While the project has seen its code base more than triple in size over the past seven years, it has maintained a high commitment to quality as it has scaled. Since 2006, the Coverity Scan service has identified 2,510 new defects of which the Samba community has fixed 1,940.
The Coverity Scan Report has become a widely accepted standard for measuring the state of open source software quality. The 2012 Scan Report found that for open source projects based on more than one million lines of code, the average defect density for good quality software is .75. In 2013, Samba had an average defect density of just .59.
As open source software continues to proliferate into the commercial software supply chain, so does the demand for visibility into code quality and security,” said Jennifer Johnson, chief marketing officer for Coverity. “Our mission with the Coverity Scan service is to provide the industry with an objective benchmark that commercial projects can use to assess open source software quality, and ultimately increase the adoption of open source software. Based on the demand we’ve seen for our annual Coverity Scan report, we realized this data is too important to be shared just once a year.
