Coverity was 7th most-read story at open source blog

A piece I did way back in January about Coverity was the 7th most popular item on this blog in 2006.

The item described a Homeland Security grant of $1.25 million aimed at making Web sites more secure.

Specifically, Coverity was to test open source code for bugs that criminals might use to do mischief. Their senior director of marketing, Rob Rachwald, told me that Linux alone now has over 6 million lines of code. Coverity's software automates the testing of that software for simple bugs to a few hours' work.

Since that was written Coverity has gone from strength-to-strength. Its software won a Technology Innovation Award. Its Coverity Prevent, a code analysis system and Coverity Extend, which finds bugs while software is in development, are both doing well in the market.

Products like this not only make software more secure, they also make it more useful. Given the complexity of today's code automating basic bug searching is absolutely essential.

Failure to properly close a function may be based on something really simple, like a missing square bracket, and it may fall thousands of lines deeper into the code than the function's start. Think you're going to find that without help? Want to spend weeks doing so?

Now you don't have to. And because of the DHS grant, money is no object.

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