ACCESS Reduces Software Defect Detection Time

ACCESS Challenge

ACCESS is a leading provider of mobile phone technology, so its software developers are responsible for delivering a wide array of applications according to strict timelines. New handset models require development of tailored software, and with new models being released on a frequent schedule, the development process needs to be controlled so that all new features are successfully implemented by their delivery dates. However, because technical specifications can sometimes adjust at the last minute, developers at ACCESS are often required to make adjustments in short timelines, which can test even the best manual testing processes.

To ensure continued, high-quality embedded software development at ACCESS, an internal quality improvement project team was created to streamline development processes. To accelerate the productivity of its development teams, ACCESS looked to find new ways to automate quality software development processes. Because ACCESS supports multiple, large-scale development projects with short turnaround times, the company needed a solution that could be seamlessly deployed to support different projects without affecting the pace of development.

Solution

After reviewing a number of technologies, ACCESS elected to leverage static analysis to provide its development teams with the ability to identify potential quality and security defects prior to run-time. By identifying defects early in the software development lifecycle, ACCESS anticipated generating significant cost and time savings through shortened testing cycles and reduced developer time. When the company sought to find an effective solution, it conducted a competitive review of seven different vendors. At the end of this evaluation, ACCESS selected Coverity Prevent.

ACCESS was able to deploy Coverity Prevent quickly after only 1.5 days of training. Software developers began deriving value from analysis results to support the company’s NetFront™ Browser development project. Based on this early success, ACCESS has relied on the use of Coverity Prevent, with development teams running Prevent to help them accelerate software development cycles.

Details

Coverity Prevent successfully delivered analysis results with a false positive rate under 10%, a significant improvement over the company’s previous static analysis tool. Prevent’s low false positive rate helped ACCESS developers save time when reviewing analysis results because of the high density of real defects.

“Coverity Prevent’s reporting system is very easy to use, it automatically identifies defects in our code bases, allows us to prioritize them.” Akira Kawase, Assistant Manager, Development Infrastructure Section, Development Support Group

Because of this low false positive rate, ACCESS estimates that developers now cuts defect detection time to 1/5 compared to before. This has allowed development teams to accelerate overall development. An additional benefit ACCESS has realized by using Coverity Prevent has been an overall improvement in development processes based on nightly analysis runs.

Conclusion

At ACCESS, developers use Prevent to ensure the quality and security of their code. Defects are found at an early stage of development by running the analysis during nightly builds. Due to the low false positive rate, the time to detect defects is 1/5 of what it was, and the whole development process has been streamlined by Prevent. A summary of results includes:

• Implemented Coverity Prevent, which delivered industry best false positive rate of less than 10%
• Reduced time required for developers to identify software defects to 1/5

About ACCESS
ACCESS CO., LTD. is a global company providing leading technology, software products and platforms for Web browsing, mobile phones, wireless handhelds, and other networked devices. ACCESS’ product portfolio, including its NetFront™ Browser, Garnet™ OS (formerly Palm OS®) and ACCESS Linux Platform™, provides customers with solutions that enable faster time to market, flexibility and customizability. The company, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, operates 24 subsidiaries and affiliates within Asia, Europe and the United States. ACCESS is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mother’s Index under the number 4813. For more information about ACCESS, please visit http://www.access-company.com.