Coverity is expected to announce its acquisition of Codefast, a software build management solution provider, on May 27.
Codefast will be the first acquisition by Coverity, which focuses on automatically improving software quality and security in C/C++ and Java applications.
Coverity officials said the Codefast technology will be enhanced to take advantage of Coverity’s Software DNA Map analysis system.
In February, Coverity accepted its first round of venture funding, a $22 million round from Foundation Capital and Benchmark Capital. Coverity used some of the proceeds from that funding to acquire Codefast, although the companies did not disclose the value of the deal.
“We dedicated the last 10 years at Codefast developing sophisticated execution engines to enable both incremental and parallel builds,” said Tom Schultz, former chief technology officer at Codefast. Schultz will assume the role of director in the Office of the CTO at Coverity. “Coverity’s Software DNA Map analysis system is the missing piece that will unlock the power of Codefast’s technology and open exciting new build efficiencies for developers,” he said.
Industry observers said the Codefast solution does source code scanning, monitors dependencies and audits builds for both Make-based and Ant-based applications. The Codefast solution, with its code scanning technology, will now likely be incorporated into the code analysis market with the Coverity acquisition. However, some observers said code analysis should typically occur during the build stage.
Andy Chou, chief scientist at Coverity, told eWEEK: “Other build management tools treat build systems as black boxes that they invoke and report on, but they lack the ability to really understand what’s going on inside. Coverity’s Software DNA Map technology provides insight into the inner workings of build systems, including the processes that are invoked to produce build artifacts and the dependencies between them.”
This is all possible without changing existing build tools or environments, as Coverity has shown with its deployment of Coverity Prevent at over 450 customer sites, Chou said. “Our unique technology will enable new build applications such as fine-grained build acceleration, guaranteed accurate build manifests and unparalleled visibility into the inner workings of build systems, no matter how complex,” he said.
Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke, a technology analysis company, said, “Many development organizations today struggle with build management and build optimization, leaving a significant opportunity for innovation from Application Lifecycle Management … vendors. This is an excellent acquisition for Coverity. It gives the company a strong product offering in an emerging ALM segment that is a natural complement to Coverity’s existing strengths in static and dynamic analysis.”