Coverity finds open source software quality better than proprietary code |

Summary: Coverity, a company specializing in software quality and security testing solutions, finds that open source programs tend to have fewer errors than proprietary programs.

The irony isn't lost on me: Coverity, a a company specializing in software quality and security testing solution, has found that open source software has fewer defects in its code than proprietary programs in the aftermath of open-source OpenSSL Heartbleed programming fiasco. Nevertheless, the numbers don't lie and the 2013 Coverity Scan Open Source Report (PDF Link) found that open source had fewer errors per thousand lines of code (KLoC) than proprietary software.

The Coverity Scan service, which the study was based on, was started with the US Department of Homeland Security in 2006. The project was designed to give hard answers to questions about open source software quality and security.

For this latest Coverity Scan Report, the company analyzed code from more than 750 open source C/C++ projects as well as an anonymous sample of enterprise projects. In addition, the report highlights analysis results from several popular, open source Java projects that have joined the Scan service since March 2013. Specifically, the company scanned the code of C/C++ programs, such as NetBSD, FreeBSD, LibreOffice, and Linux, and Java projects such as Apache Hadoop, HBase, and Cassandra.

The 2013 report's key findings included:

Zack Samocha, senior director of products for Coverity, said in a statement, "Our objective with the Coverity Scan service is to help the open source community create high-quality software. Based on the results of this report as well as the increasing popularity of the service open source software projects that leverage development testing continue to increase the quality of their software, such that they have raised the bar for the entire industry."

Coverity also announced that it has opened up access to the Coverity Scan service, allowing anyone interested in open source software to view the progress of participating projects. Individuals can now become Project Observers, which enables them to track the state of relevant open source projects in the Scan service and view high-level data including the count of outstanding defects, fixed defects, and defect density.

"Weve seen an exponential increase in the number of people who have asked to join the Coverity Scan service, simply to monitor the defects being found and fixed. In many cases, these people work for large enterprise organizations that utilize open source software within their commercial projects," concluded Samocha. "By opening up the Scan service to these individuals, we are now enabling a new level of visibility into the code quality of the open-source projects, which they are including in their software supply chain."