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Coverity, a provider of development testing solutions, recently announced the next generation of its Coverity Development Testing Platform, an integrated suite of software testing technologies for identifying and remediating critical quality and security issues during development.
Coverity’s new release features the new Coverity Test Advisor, which includes technology for change impact analysis to focus unit testing on high risk code, including changed code and code impacted by a change, alerting developers of code not covered by unit tests.
Moreover, time to market demands have increased the speed of development and the rate of change. Coverity said traditional unit testing has been inefficient, failing to focus squarely on critical parts of the code and lacking insight into change impact. Technology to enable development testing must sufficiently cover the risk areas in the code, including intelligence into code change without slowing down development.
The new Coverity Development Testing Platform 6.5 helps manage the risk of change while accelerating time to market through intelligent code and test analysis, remediation, governance and policy management, and software development lifecycle (SDLC) integrations.
Coverity has extended its Static Analysis Verification Engine (Coverity SAVE) for accurate and scalable techniques in defect detection, with new analysis innovations including change impact analysis. This ensures that code changes are sufficiently tested by automatically mapping code and function dependencies to analyze impacted code related to a change—both code that has been directly modified and unmodified code that is impacted by the code change. Coverity SAVE also features intelligent Java quality and security analysis. This identifies quality and security issues through enhanced quality analysis and new security analysis for Java Web applications, including an enterprise framework analyzer which augments static source code analysis to identify new types of defects and minimize false positives.
Meanwhile, Coverity provides developers with accurate and actionable information to fix quality defects, security defects, test violations and third-party analysis defects in a unified workflow. The platform includes a remediation engine that gives developers precise, defect-specific guidance to help them fix security defects correctly and efficiently, without specialized knowledge.
“Our platform was built specifically for developers and development organizations, and this release gives them an even deeper level of insight into their code and overall software risk,” Jennifer Johnson, vice president of marketing at Coverity, told eWEEK. “What makes this release particularly important is our ability to flag high risk code changes and their ripple effects or downstream impact of those changes. Unit testing is a valuable part of any development testing organization, but often times its ineffective and many times high risk code can go untested after changes are made. We took our deep knowledge of code behavior and criticality and applied that to unit testing to focus and improve it. With this happening in the early phases of development, remediation is easier and less costly and application quality soars.”
“Business innovation relies on rapidly changing, adaptive software, and effective, targeted quality strategies demand visibility into code changes and their impact,” said Melinda Ballou, program director of IDC’s Application Life-Cycle Management and Executive Strategies service, in a statement. “Fragmented approaches to quality, security and change management are expensive and can lead to prohibitive application failure and wasted resources. We recommend bringing these areas together with an integrated workflow and coordinated platform.”
Coverity’s new platform features an open platform API where companies can integrate third-party software analysis results into the Coverity Development Testing Platform. In addition, Coverity enables the creation of consistent development testing standards across internal and offshore teams, open source, and third-party suppliers to monitor against these standards, pinpoint areas of risk and make better release decisions. Coverity also supports bi-directional integration with existing lifecycle tools including IDEs, source control management, test coverage, bug tracking, build and continuous integration and application lifecycle management solution to make development testing a natural part of the SDLC process.
“Our SDLC process needs extreme precision to ensure resilient and fast software delivery,” said Saro Jahani, CIO of Direct Edge, in a statement. “A cornerstone in our process is development testing. Coverity equips our developers with the right process and technology to find and fix issues early, quickly and efficiently. With this focus and predictability, we are able to keep pace with the rapid rate of change and deliver high quality products and services in shorter, more efficient iterations. Development testing is a competitive differentiator for our business through reduced risk, better stability, faster functionality and accelerated time to market.”
“Smart companies recognize the need for development testing but it’s not just about cobbling together disparate, inaccurate and inefficient tools,” Coverity’s Johnson said in a statement. “Coverity provides development with the right focus, intelligence, information and visibility to operationalize development testing in a way that makes software delivery fast, resilient and predictable. This ultimately leads to competitive advantage.”