Coverity is a proprietary

static code analysis In computer science, static program analysis (or static analysis) is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution. The term ...

tool from

Synopsys Synopsys is an American electronic design automation (EDA) company that focuses on silicon design and verification, silicon intellectual property and software security and quality. Products include tools for logic synthesis and physical desig ...

. This product enables engineers and security teams to find and fix software defects. Coverity started as an independent software company in 2002 at the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was founded by Benjamin Chelf, Andy Chou, and Seth Hallem with Stanford professor

Dawson Engler Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist and an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. Career After graduating from University of Arizona, Engler earned his Ph.D. from the Massachuse ...

as a technical adviser. The headquarters was moved to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. In June 2008, Coverity acquired Solidware Technologies. In February 2014, Coverity announced an agreement to be acquired by

, an

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools work together ...

company, for $350 million net of cash on hand.

Products

Coverity is a

tool for C, C++, C#,

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

, Python, .NET, ASP.NET,

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its N ...

, Go, JSP,

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum (aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapp ...

Swift Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIFT ...

, Fortran, Scala, VB.NET, and

TypeScript TypeScript is a free and open source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language. It is designed for the development of large appl ...

. It also supports more than 70 different frameworks for Java, JavaScript, C# and other languages. Coverity Scan is a free static-analysis cloud-based service for the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

community.

Applications

Under a

United States Department of Homeland Security The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the Federal government of the United States, U.S. United States federal executive departments, federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the I ...

contract in 2006, the tool was used to examine over 150 open source applications for bugs; 6000 bugs found by the scan were fixed across 53 projects.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA ) is an agency of the U.S. federal government, part of the Department of Transportation. It describes its mission as "Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes" rel ...

used the tool in its 2010-2011 investigation into reports of

sudden unintended acceleration Sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) is the unintended, unexpected, uncontrolled acceleration of a vehicle, often accompanied by an apparent loss of braking effectiveness. Such problems may be caused by driver error (e.g., pedal misapplication), ...

in Toyota vehicles. The tool was used by CERN on the software employed in the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundr ...

and in the

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedi ...

Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in the 1930s by Caltech researchers, JPL is owned by NASA ...

during the flight software development of the Mars rover ''Curiosity''."Coverity: Mars Rover Curiosity's 'Space Doctors' On Bug Hunting In Space"
/ref>

References

{{reflist Static program analysis tools Software testing tools Software companies based in California Companies based in San Francisco Defunct software companies of the United States