Improve Software Quality

Build systems are often a common and critical point of failure in software development organizations. A slow or error-prone build can cause costly delays in bringing software applications to market. Because conventional build management tools view the build as a ‘black box’, these quality defects persist due to the fact that build engineers and developers lack the visibility they need to ensure builds consistently meet software integrity standards. Coverity’s build analysis capability allows teams to gain control over software builds by opening this ‘black box’ and providing deep insight into the build.

Eliminate Build Bottlenecks

Once teams have gained visibility into the build, they can begin to understand and optimize the composition of each individual build. Brittle and unstable builds cost organizations countless hours of developer productivity each day. Faster build times for your software means faster time-to-market of your products. Not only can engineers determine the root cause of slow or failed builds, they can also begin to assess the overall integrity of the build and answer key questions:

1. What components were assembled?
2. Were they the right ones?
3. What processes were run and how often?

Additionally, Build Analysis can be used to set rules to ensure proper compilation flags and enforce inclusion or exclusion of directories and libraries that should not be in the build. Arming developers and build engineers with this valuable information makes the team more productive and the build process more efficient.

Manage Change

Today’s large, complex code bases are especially susceptible to the hazards of constant change. A “minor” fix injected into any one code component can have major ramifications to the entire code base. Build Analysis helps engineers control the effects of change by allowing them to create a map of all processes that are executed during the build. For each process, this map contains a complete set of all the input files to that process and all the output files that are generated by that process providing teams with a dependency tree for the entire software production process with file and process granularity.

Ensure Security and Compliance

Similar to the challenges of managing software change, development teams in regulated industries must often adhere to strict rules for verification and validation of their code. This means teams are required to accurately test changes and prove that all the code in a delivered application is the code that was actually tested. A Source Code Management (SCM) system can produce an auditable list of files that comprise a build, but how can teams show that the files that have been checked out are actually the files contained in a specific build? Or that the list itself is complete for a specific build?

Componentization

Many organizations pursue componentization initiatives to enable the effective reuse of software. Build Analysis offers development teams the ability to determine the integrity of each software component that is part of a build, including third party and open source components. Deep visibility into the integrity of each component in your application has the added advantage of enabling increased build accuracy and ensuring that build artifacts, such as library components or jars, are not unnecessarily rebuilt and delivered into testing environments that trigger excessive retesting.

Contact us to find out how Build Analyzer can shorten your development cycles and improve your code quality.