Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Coverity identified that over 8,500 bugs have been repaired within the two year period they covered. Yet, the developers aren’t simply fixing what’s broken; they’re genuinely getting better too. The density of program faults to lines of code has dropped by 16% in this same time meaning that while, of course, totally bug-free software is not being released, the number of problems are becoming more sparse.
It’s worth pointing out at this time that Coverity don’t reveal the actual nature of the bugs they’ve found to anyone but the relevant project team; it’s not a one-stop-shop for virus and exploit authors.
Coverity do make available to the public, however, a measure of how rapidly the tracked open source projects respond to resolving flaws. They divided the projects into three rungs numbered 0 to 2. Projects on rung 2 were considered to have exceptionally low defect density. The development teams responsible can be lauded for writing highly clean code. When software faults have been revealed, the developers have responded swiftly to issue patches.
Each of the projects on rung 2 happen to have over 50,000 lines of code and are thus all quite substantial works of code. Here they are, and you’ll definitely recognise a few:
This research should rightly be used to inspire confidence in each of the products listed. Those building web sites in PHP, for instance, can be assured their language of choice is not exposing either their users or themselves to any significant risk of exploit. This is also true for those implementing heterogeneous network infrastructures using Samba.
In fact, Samba’s team fixed over 75% of the problems found by Scan within two reviews of the Scan analysis; ie three out of four problems were fixed within two iterations of the code analysis. Amanda’s team fixed over 40% of problems within one review. In case you’re interested Amanda is a network backup system which can back up a large number of UNIX/Linux workstations to a single backup server.
Projects at rung 1 were less responsive; defects uncovered by Coverity still existed during later scans – or, I should add, have not had a sufficient number of Coverity scans performed to ascertain responsiveness. However, progress to rung 2 is only possible by achieving a reasonably low defect count; any open source project remaining on rung 1 over time is not being noted for rapid response.
Projects at this rung include apache-httpd, emacs, firefox, FreeBSD, gcc, glibc, GNOME, KDE, the Linux kernel 2.6, Mono, NetBSD, PostgreSQL, snort, tcpdump, Wine and X-Windows (X.org) among others.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
