RTS Embedded Systems Conference, PARIS, March 7 - Coverity, Inc., makers of the world's most advanced source code analysis solution, today announced the general availability of a new version of Coverity Extend, a suite of tools that enables embedded, ISV and enterprise developers to easily create customized source code checkers that work with Coverity Prevent, the company's flagship analysis product. The new version now has full access to C/C++ types and comes with a new library of examples as well as extensive documentation. The product is an important upgrade for developers working on software with special features that require unique source code analysis checks.

Symbian is the world-leading open operating system that powers more than 70 million mobile phones from the world's leading handset manufacturers. Symbian needed tools to help manage a multi-country development staff of more than 500 engineers to ensure the quality of all lines of code for the Symbian OS. The company needed the flexibility of Extend to analyze their highly customizable software that required a different configuration for each mobile phone platform. In addition, Symbian developers needed the ability to continually extend the scope of the analysis to find specialized bugs that were unique to each phone platform.

"We picked Coverity specifically because of Extend, which lets us write our own custom checkers to work against the unique Symbian code base," said Neil Taylor, Technology Architect at Symbian. "We had an exhaustive list of requirements for introduction of a static code analysis tool and we looked at a number of products. Only Coverity could handle our requirements and the complexity of our 5 million lines of code base."

After implementing Coverity Extend, any of Symbian's engineers could create custom checkers to analyze any configuration of the mobile OS. Each custom checker was made accessible to all the engineers in the group, enabling a sophisticated customized checking library to be built up rapidly. The engineering group estimates that each defect Coverity found saved three engineering days of troubleshooting effort. Furthermore, each custom defect checker can then be used by all members of a development team.

"When used strategically, Extend can be a powerful accelerator to the quality assurance process," said Ben Chelf, CTO at Coverity. "Custom checkers built with Extend use the vast pool of knowledge in the development group, resulting in checkers that precisely understand the nuances of the code. Development managers can leverage their entire development team to improve the quality assurance process, enforce coding policies, and build a unique base of reusable intellectual property that can be used to analyze all paths in their software with project-specific checks."

Coverity Extend offers developers an alternative to manual code review processes, which can only address portions of a large code base. Through the strategic use of automation and customized checks, development groups can regularly perform a complete review of the entire code and establish processes for enforcing programming conventions. Software development groups can create and enforce policies and processes for building quality into software or create compliance packages for internal coding policies and industry coding standards. Customized code audit processes can be automated. Organizations can also create customized security checks to guard against unauthorized access to sensitive data and other malicious exploits.

Key features in Coverity Extend include:
   
    -- Full access to C/C++ types
    -- Popular C++ syntax for custom checkers, allowing any developer to
       quickly create checkers in a familiar environment
    -- Flexibility to create almost any checking function
    -- Library of reference examples that speed up the development of
       checkers
    -- Documentation to make it easier to create custom checkers
    -- Checkers that run in development time

About Coverity

Coverity (www.coverity.com), the leader in improving software quality and security, is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco. Coverity's groundbreaking technology removes the barriers to writing and delivering complex software by automatically finding and helping to fix critical software defects and security vulnerabilities as the software is written. More than 200 leading companies choose Coverity because it scales to tens of millions of lines of code, has the lowest false positive rate and provides 100 percent path coverage. Companies like Juniper Networks, Symantec/VERITAS, McAfee, Synopsys, NASA, Palm and Wind River work with Coverity's tools to find and fix security and quality defects from their mission-critical code.

NOTE: Coverity is a registered trademark, and Coverity Extend and Coverity Prevent are trademarks of Coverity, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.

Web site: http://www.coverity.com