01482nas a2200121   4500008004100000022001400041245002000055210002000075260004200095520116800137100001901305856003601324       2008                        eng d  a1913-610200aCoverity Report0 aCoverity Report  aOttawabTalent First Networkc06/20083 aOn May 20, 2008, static analysis tool vendor Coverity released a report entitled "Open Source Report 2008". The report includes information gathered over the first two years of the Coverity Scan project which was developed as part of a contract from the US Department of Homeland Security. Coverity provides its analysis tools to open source projects in order to identify quality and security flaws in the codebases. Once identified, the developers of the open source projects are given the information in order to facilitate hardening of the software.

The report includes information about the progress made by various projects using the Scan service. Additionally, the Scan databases constitute one of the largest and most diverse collections of source code to be built and analyzed while tracking changes to those code bases over a two-year period. This data provides a substantial set of samples for considering some questions about the nature of software. The report investigates relationships between codebase size, defect counts, defect density, function lengths, and code complexity metrics. This article highlights some of the results from the report.1 aMaxwell, David  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/156