Coverity Prevent for Symbian C++

LONDON, UK: Coverity Inc., a provider in improving software quality and security, has announced the availability of new Symbian C++ specific defect detection capabilities in Coverity Prevent, the company's flagship static analysis solution. Developed with input from Symbian, the new capabilities automatically identify software defects that are unique to Symbian OS, the market-leading open operating system for mobile phones.

"As more and more developers are developing for Symbian OS it's great news that leading tools such as Coverity Prevent are offering Symbian-specific capabilities to help these developers more easily test and debug their applications, and generally accelerate their time-to-market," said Antony Edwards, Vice President Developer Product Marketing, Symbian. "As part of Symbian's own commitment to delivering high integrity code, we already use Coverity Prevent internally to analyse Symbian OS."

Symbian OS is a highly flexible, scalable platform for delivering next-generation mobile applications. As is true for any open platform, Symbian OS exposes APIs that allow developers to leverage the functionality of the platform, but developers must use these APIs correctly or they may introduce defects into their applications.

-- Symbian OS Cleanup Stack -- This checker verifies that allocated memory always has exactly one owner responsible for its deallocation. To accomplish this, it understands how objects interact with the Symbian API. Specifically, interactions with the global cleanup stack can be complex and developer interaction with this stack often results in memory leaks and application crashes.

-- Symbian C++ Naming -- This checker verifies that naming conventions mandated by Symbian are followed properly. To accomplish this, it monitors multiple application events such as identity, pop and push. Failure to follow Symbian C++ naming conventions can generate serious defects regarding the behavior of functions.

Symbian is also on track to complete Coverity level one certification for Symbian OS in early 2009. Coverity certification is a rigorous process of defect inspection and elimination that is complete after the source code for a given application has been analyzed and all Coverity reported defects have been eliminated. As part of the certification initiative, development teams also create regular, repeatable processes for addressing any new defects that appear in code as it evolves from release to release.

"With code bases growing larger and more complex, traditional testing and manual code review methods have become ineffective for ensuring code quality and preventing field defects," said Coverity CTO, Ben Chelf. "The capabilities developed by Coverity with support from Symbian will provide immediate benefit to any development organization creating next-generation mobile applications that are destined for use on Symbian OS."

Coverity brings effective static analysis to Symbian OS and ensures the highest possible code integrity by enabling automatic defect detection early in the development cycle where they are the easiest and least costly to eliminate.