Hi all, If you've been following recent git commits, you'll have noticed a lot of "Coverity" related commits, and may be wondering what these are all about.
Coverity Scan ( https://scan.coverity.com/ ) is a powerful automated static code analyser which is able to detect a large number of code errors, such as memory leaks and potential crashes, and even things like accidental copy/paste errors. It's a well respected service and fortunately offers free testing of open source projects (it's quite expensive for commercial software). When we first ran Coverity over the QGIS codebase about 2 weeks ago it picked up just over 1000 potential issues, with a defect density of about 1 error per 1000 lines of code. Apparently the standard for "good" software is a defect density of 1. For comparison, python sits at 0.08, and the Linux kernel at 0.53. Libreoffice's latest release hit 0.02, and they used this as a big highlight of their press release [1]. Thanks to Jürgen and Martin's assistance we're now down to a defect density of 0.26. I'm hoping that with a bit more work we can smash this down even further and possibly even reach the coveted "Coverity Clean" status [2] for 2.8. In any case this is a great demonstration that we are serious about code quality and stable releases, and is a good selling point for our first LTS release (alongside the expanding test suite and Travis CI testing). Unfortunately we can't automate submission to Coverity via Travis builds due to the compilation time required to build QGIS using Coverity exceeding Travis' limits, so I'm currently manually submitting builds to Coverity on a semi-regular schedule. The full Coverity defect reports are available by invitation only. If you're a developer and want to view them, let me know and I'll add you to the group. Nyall [1] http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2015/01/29/libreoffice-4-4-the-most-beautiful-libreoffice-ever/ [2] Why is this important? well... I really want to beat MapInfo there! http://www.pb.com/pbs-voc/product-improvements.shtml _______________________________________________ Qgis-developer mailing list Qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
