About
About Coverity's Scan
Coverity is a company that creates tools for software development. Its premiere product is Prevent, a static-analysis code inspection tool. Coverity offers the results of Prevent's analysis for free to open source developers.
If you are a member of an open source project, and your project is already listed on the Scan Ladder, read the Developer FAQ then follow the Sign In link beside the entry for your project on the ladder.
If you are a member of an open source project, and your project is not already listed, read the Developer FAQ, then please email scan-admin@coverity.com
If you are not a member of an open source project, please see the FAQ for additional information about why access is limited to developers.
History
The Scan project was launched on March 6, 2006. In the first year of operation, over 6000 software defects were fixed by open source developers using the analysis results from the Scan. In the first year, 50 open source projects written in C and C++ were included.
You can see what the Scan results looked like at the end of the first year.
Hundreds of open source developers registered to view the results of the analysis.
On the first-year anniversary, March 6, 2007, Coverity unveiled the expansion of the Scan project. The Web page was redesigned. More projects were added. More information was made available for developers and others interested in understanding what the Scan is and how developers use it.
A new framework was put into place to help open source developers learn how to use the Scan results by gradually introducing them to more advanced features of the Prevent tool. Projects that actively use the Scan results are eligible to move up the ladder and receive access to additional functionality. Finally, within the new framework of the Scan Ladder, additional analysis results that were not enabled during Scan's first year were made available to the developers.
About Static Analysis
Static analysis is a set of processes for finding source code flaws without executing the program, providing test datasets or test cases.
The analysis is discussed in the Frequently Asked Questions.
About David Maxwell
David is Coverity's Open Source Strategist. He is responsible for Scan and other open source efforts for Coverity.
David was first exposed to the Prevent analysis results before the Scan project was launched. Results had been made available to The FreeBSD Project, and led to many defects being fixed in FreeBSD. David is a developer in The NetBSD Project. On behalf of NetBSD, David contacted Coverity to request an analysis of the NetBSD sources.
After the tremendous tangible benefit to open source projects from Scan's first year, Coverity decided to hire someone from the open source community to manage the further expansion of the Scan project. David is that representative, and is looking forward to providing results to many more open source projects.
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