Coverity has announced Coverity 5, a software tool that automatically scans, prioritizes, and maps the impact of defects introduced by software changes. This tool is specifically designed to help development teams mitigate the business risk of software changes across their entire product portfolio.

Software changes introduce defects that can damage products in the portfolio that share that same code. Using traditional software analysis approaches, it is difficult, if not impossible, for developers to know exactly which projects, teams, and products are impacted by new defects introduced by software changes. Coverity 5 lets developers automatically scan software for new defects introduced by changes, instantly prioritize defect severity, and map impact to all products sharing the same code

To accomplish this, Coverity 5 features two change impact capabilities:

• Defect impact mapping capability lets developers automatically map and identify how a single defect impacts multiple code bases, projects, and products across the portfolio.
• Unified defect management interface lets developers and management review, prioritize, and triage their C/C++, Java, and C# defects in a single workflow, providing a single version of the truth for the state of integrity across the entire product portfolio.

"Mitigating the risk of software changes is one of the biggest challenges for our global customer base, and we are tackling this problem head on with Coverity 5," says Coverity's Seth Hallem. "Our new defect impact management capabilities mark the most significant innovation in the software integrity market since our introduction of commercial static analysis. Coverity 5 delivers an unprecedented level of defect impact visibility to developers so they can make highly informed business decisions on how they prioritize and triage software problems."

Among the other capabilities Coverity 5 provides are:

• Rich defect knowledge base gives developers detailed information on every defect discovered by Coverity, including plain language defect explanations and an assessment of the potential impact of the defect from both Coverity's proprietary defect index and the industry standard Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE).
• Automatic severity filtering that takes developers to high impact defects.
• A code browser that provides advanced defect drill-down capabilities.
• Advanced defect reporting provides developers and managers an easy way to track defects fixed, defect trends, the overall state of integrity across the entire product line and evidence for defect remediation for compliance reporting.

Operating system platforms that Coverity 5 supports include: Windows XP/Vista, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. Programming language support includes: C, C++, Java, and C#, while IDE support is Eclipse and Visual Studio. Coverity 5 will be generally available by the end of the first quarter of 2010.