LibreOffice makes strides in software quality with Coverity Scan

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Coverity Inc., a Synopsys company, announced the results of its latest Coverity Scan Project Spotlight, which analyzed the LibreOffice open source project, including defect density and the types of defects identified, as compared to the industry average. The report is an update from the Coverity Scan Project Spotlight on LibreOffice issued in November 2013.

LibreOffice is a Document Foundation project which began as an offshoot of the OpenOffice open source collaboration suite in 2010. It is the default office suite of the most popular Linux distributions including Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu, and has the support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), AMD, Google and Intel. It is also available in more than 112 languages and for a variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Since last year's Coverity Scan Project Spotlight, the LibreOffice team analyzed more than 9 million lines of code to find and fix more than 6,000 defects – including high- and medium-impact defects like null pointer dereferences, resource leaks and error handling issues.

The team also reduced the project's defect density from .8 to .08, far lower than the defect density for like-sized projects using the Coverity Scan service. For comparison, the 2013 Coverity Scan Open Source Report found the average defect density for open source projects with more than 1 million lines of code was .65, and for like-sized proprietary code bases was .71.

"LibreOffice's remarkable results after just two years of using the Coverity Scan service reiterates the mission criticality of software testing for the open source community to find and fix software defects early," said Zack Samocha, senior director of products for Coverity. "We applaud the LibreOffice development team for their commitment to creating and delivering high-quality software."