Coverity 5.5 Released, Includes Integration With HP ALM Platform

Coverity, maker of software development testing tools, has released version 5.5 of its testing suite and is announcing integration with HP’s application life cycle management (ALM) platform, which is used by thousands of enterprises and other businesses to develop software applications. A key advantage of the integration, says Coverity, is that the people doing quality assurance (QA) on an application build can be tied in with the people setting the business requirements for what the software is supposed to do, and vice versa.

Closer collaboration between QA and the rest of the development team can speed up the development process and create higher-quality software, says Jennifer Johnson, VP of product marketing for Coverity. "A lot of times, QA doesn’t get visibility into the build until they get it [to do QA], and it creates a lot of wasted time, ... so they can actually see the defects and kind of collaborate with development through a single platform before the build even gets to them. It makes our testing process more efficient," Johnson says.

Coverity made a point of integration with HP ALM because it is an industry-standard platform for managing application development work flow, Johnson adds. A key feature of ALM is Quality Center, a Web-based quality management platform that became part of HP through its acquisition of Mercury Interactive software in 2006.

HP has made a number software acquisitions in recent years to build up its enterprise software business to better compete against IBM and Microsoft, the No. 1 and No. 2 global software companies, respectively, based on revenue. HP software acquisitions include ArcSight, a security compliance software provider, and Fortify Software, which delivers software security assurance, both in 2010. On Tuesday, HP completed its $10.3 billion acquisition of U.K.-based Autonomy Software, which provides a solution for managing volumes of structured and unstructured data in enterprises. Some critics said HP paid too much for Autonomy.

Coverity, meanwhile, also released a major upgrade of its Coverity suite, including adding support for two other widely used development platforms: the open source Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) for Java applications and the Visual Studio IDE for building Microsoft .Net programs, says Zack Samocha, director of product management for Coverity. In addition, version 5.5 adds support for the Jenkins continuous integration server environment, which automatically tests code for defects with every build in an Agile development process. Jenkins is the open source version of the commercial continuous integration server Hudson, from Oracle.

"If I’m a customer using Agile .. it means that on every check-in I have a build which is running to analyze and generate the code and have a new build. We tie into that process," Samocha explains. Coverity 5.5 also adds tools to hasten collaboration between widely distributed development teams and adds support for FindBugs, a popular open source bug fixer tool.

The purpose of the enhancements to Coverity 5.5 and the integration with HP ALM is to speed up and improve the development process without leaving bugs, says Johnson. "The big theme of this release is removing developer barriers to adoption, because if it doesn’t fit into their workflow or it’s going to create more work ... you can’t use it," she adds.

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