Coverity launches Code Spotter in free beta version

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Coverity, Inc., a Synopsys company, announced the launch of Coverity Code Spotter, a cloud-based service enabling developers to find hard-to-detect defects in Java code. Built on Coverity's static code analysis technology, Code Spotter is available for free to the software development community during the beta period.

Using Code Spotter, developers can upload as much Java source code as they would like to the service. The service is designed to find the most common and critical issues in Java code bases, including resource leaks, race conditions, concurrency issues, control flow issues, null pointer dereferences, issues detected by the open source FindBugs tool, copy and paste errors, and many other software defects resulting in incorrect or unpredictable program behavior.

"There are more than six million professional software developers in the world writing at least 60 million lines of code every day, which means the need for a simple-to-use, lightweight process for testing software quality and security has never been more critical," said Dennis Chu, senior product manager for Coverity. "With Code Spotter, we've aimed to do just that by expanding our SaaS offerings to provide even more developers across the globe with tools that make it easier to produce high-quality software."

Code Spotter works by integrating with developers' build systems. It intercepts and compiles the source code files that are part of a project, and then uploads them to the Code Spotter servers for analysis. Once the analysis job is complete, developers can examine the results on the Code Spotter website or download the results for review locally.