[dundee] Open-Source Code Quality Improving

[Iain Barnett]

On 24 Sep 2009, at 15:21, Robert Ladyman wrote:

> mickey.mouse at disney.com (Position: Cartoon Character) registered  
> for me and
> allowed me to look at his copy. He told me that the use "Static  
> Analyis" of
> defect density (so that they can compare projects) in lines of code  
> and
> compare a scan of a project at one time with later scans. Their  
> false positive
> (for defects) is about 14%. Mickey also said that the report gave  
> roughly one
> defect per 3333 lines (0.3 near enough) but now it's down to one  
> per 4000
> lines (0.25).
>

It was this comment on slashdot (and a few other sites covering the  
story) that made me ask the question

"In fact, the analysis demonstrated that proprietary code is, on  
average, more than five times less buggy. On the other hand, the open- 
source software was found to be of greater average overall quality."

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/07/173255&tid=683


This separates the bugs from the quality (otherwise it would be a  
contradiction) - so what is "quality"?  I downloaded the report to  
have a look, and it seems that basically, for Coverity, quality ==  
less bugs.


Iain

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/dundee/attachments/20090924/799bae4b/attachment.htm