IDG News Service - Coverity has updated its development testing suite so that its results can be displayed directly from within the HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite software, Coverity announced Monday.
Program managers and other users of HP's ALM can see the number or the severity of the defects that developers unearthed in their programs when they used Coverity Static Analysis and FindBugs.
The pairing "brings in a new level of collaboration between developers and QA [quality assurance testers]," said Jennifer Johnson, Coverity director of product marketing. "A lot of times, QA doesn't get visibility into what development is doing until they get a build, and if there are a lot of defects in [the code], it makes the testing process much more difficult."
HP's ALM harmonizes the work between managers, analysts and QA to oversee the development of a new program. The Coverity suite of products, featuring the core Coverity Static Analysis program, is marketed for developers. It can scan a block of code and identify potential problems, such as memory defects or concurrency issues.
Typically, a project manager or business analyst might develop a set of requirements for a new program, which developers then would use to build a program. After an initial build, a program would go through several rounds of testing, where the developers would fix any problems that were discovered.
With this connector, developers can run the Coverity tools and the results will show up in HP ALM, eliminating the need for developers to file separate reports, or for the QA testers or managers to wait for a build to be delivered.
The pairing also ties requirements to defects, Johnson said. "As business requirements come in, you can actually tie the defects to those requirements, so you have a better understanding of where the risk is."
The connector will be offered alongside the newest version of the Coverity suite, version 5.5, which will be available Oct. 18.
In addition to the HP connector, Coverity 5.5 features performance improvements, 20 new or enhanced checkers and integration with Coverity's FindBugs Java analysis tool. Another set of plug-ins allows developers to find, verify and fix code from directly within the Eclipse or Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Developer Environment).
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
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