Open-Source Python Code Shows Lowest Defect Density

cold fjord sends news that a study by Coverity has found open-source Python code to contain a lower defect density than any other language. "The 2012 Scan Report found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects that leverage the Coverity Scan service, as compared to the accepted industry standard defect density for good quality software of 1.0. Python's defect density of .005 significantly surpasses this standard, and introduces a new level of quality for open source software. To date, the Coverity Scan service has analyzed nearly 400,000 lines of Python code and identified 996 new defects — 860 of which have been fixed by the Python community."

Re:Coverity: Static analyzer

[Anonymous Coward]

We've ran Coverity on several very large projects where I work. For C++ it did a decent job of finding little and simple things that Visual Studio missed, like variables that were never initialized before use, subtle type violations Visual Studio missed, or accessing past the end of a statically allocated array. These aren't the sorts of bugs that we worry about. The evil bugs - like those created by programmers that don't know enough about multithreading but were assigned because some offshore contractor service is the only place we're allowed to staff from and nobody vets their skillsets - all slipped right by Coverity and had to be fixed by the few remaining senior programmers. ( Attrition will fix that problem soon, at least for the senior programmers moving anywhere less strategically suicidal. )

Hey metric retards

[Sulik]

While it can be useful in pinpointing common code defects, interpreting coverity results as an absolute indicator of code quality is just retarded. 90% of coverity's defect's tend to be really false positives that would be obvious to even the average code monkey... Not sure that massaging a code base to please coverity and getting a 'high score' is really any kind of achievement and may be more an indicator that you have way too much time on your hands...

Re:Python == LAME

[MikeBabcock]

Nope, nobody at all http://www.python.org/about/success/ [python.org]

Jeez.